New research by scientists at North Carolina State University (NC State) has demonstrated that genes are capable of identifying and responding to coded information in light signals, as well as filtering out some signals entirely. Their study findings showed how a single mechanism can trigger different behaviors from the same gene. “The fundamental idea here is that you can encode information in the dynamics of a signal that a gene is receiving,” said Albert Keung, PhD, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State. “So, rather than a signal simply being present or absent, the way in which the signal is being presented matters.”
The researchers say there are practical applications for their work in the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. “In biomanufacturing, you often want to manage both the growth of cells and the rate at which those cells are producing specific proteins,” said Jessica Lee, PhD, research assistant at NC State. “Our work here can help manufacturers fine-tune and control both of those variables.” Lee is first author, and Keung is corresponding author of the team’s published paper in Cell Systems, which is titled, “Mapping the dynamic transfer functions of eukaryotic gene regulation,” and in which they concluded, “This work directly demonstrates the signal processing potential of a single individual gene and develops molecular and computational tools that can be used to harness it.”
There is plenty of evidence that biological information can be encoded in the dynamics of signaling components, and not just in their biochemical identities, the authors noted. This has been implicated in a range of physiological processes, such as the stress response, stem cell differentiation, and oncogenesis. “Cells, with a limited number of components, utilize dynamic signal processing to perform sophisticated functions in response to complex environments,” the researchers stated. “Transcription factors (TFs) may be a particularly important archetype for this type of information transmission, as they are relatively low in diversity but must command many distinct and complex gene expression programs.”…
