Cell size and growth rate regulation of stochastic gene expression

Part of the mathematical biology and medicine seminar series.

Vahid Shahrezaei (Imperial College London)

Cells adopt their physiology globally in response to different growth conditions. This includes changes in cell division rate, cell size, and also in gene expression. These global physiological changes are expected to affect noise in gene expression in addition to average expression. Gene expression is inherently stochastic and the amount of noise in proteins depend on parameters of gene expression and cell division cycle.

Here we use models of stochastic gene expression inside growing and dividing cells to study the effect of cell division rate and cell size on noise in gene expression. In the second part of the talk, I discuss how the single moleucle RNA Fish data can be used to infer specific form of global regulation of gene expression by cell size