Reduction of population variability in protein expression: A control engineering approach

Abstract

[Abstract] Controlling protein expression level is of interest in many applications. Yet, the stochastic nature of gene expression plays an important role and cannot be disregarded. We propose a gene synthetic circuit designed to control the mean gene expression in a population of cells and its variance. The circuit combines an intracellular negative feedback loop and quorum sensing based cell-to-cell communication system. Our in silico analysis using stochastic simulations reveals significant noise attenuation in gene expression through the interplay between quorum sensing and negative feedback, and explain their different roles for different noise sources. Preliminary in vivo results agree well with the computational results.