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Phenotype accessibility and noise in random threshold gene regulatory networks.

ABSTRACT: Evolution requires phenotypic variation in a population of organisms for selection to function. Gene regulatory processes involved in organismal development affect the phenotypic diversity of organisms. Since only a fraction of all possible phenotypes are predicted to be accessed by the end of development, organisms may evolve strategies to use environmental cues and noise-like fluctuations to produce additional phenotypic diversity, and hence to enhance the speed of adaptation. We used a generic model of organismal development --gene regulatory networks-- to investigate how different levels of noise on gene expression states (i.e. phenotypes) may affect access to new, unique phenotypes, thereby affecting phenotypic diversity. We studied additional strategies that organisms might adopt to attain larger phenotypic diversity: either by augmenting their genome or the number of gene expression states. This was done for different types of gene regulatory networks that allow for distinct levels of regulatory influence on gene expression or are more likely to give rise to stable phenotypes. We found that if gene expression is binary, increasing noise levels generally decreases phenotype accessibility for all network types studied. If more gene expression states are considered, noise can moderately enhance the speed of discovery if three or four gene expression states are allowed, and if there are enough distinct regulatory networks in the population. These results were independent of the network types analyzed, and were robust to different implementations of noise. Hence, for noise to increase the number of accessible phenotypes in gene regulatory networks, very specific conditions need to be satisfied. If the number of distinct regulatory networks involved in organismal development is large enough, and the acquisition of more genes or fine tuning of their expression states proves costly to the organism, noise can be useful in allowing access to more unique phenotypes.

SUBMITTER: Pinho R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4412837 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:BackgroundThe linear noise approximation (LNA) is commonly used to predict how noise is regulated and exploited at the cellular level. These predictions are exact for reaction networks composed exclusively of first order reactions or for networks involving bimolecular reactions and large numbers of molecules. It is however well known that gene regulation involves bimolecular interactions with molecule numbers as small as a single copy of a particular gene. It is therefore questionable how reliable are the LNA predictions for these systems.ResultsWe implement in the software package intrinsic Noise Analyzer (iNA), a system size expansion based method which calculates the mean concentrations and the variances of the fluctuations to an order of accuracy higher than the LNA. We then use iNA to explore the parametric dependence of the Fano factors and of the coefficients of variation of the mRNA and protein fluctuations in models of genetic networks involving nonlinear protein degradation, post-transcriptional, post-translational and negative feedback regulation. We find that the LNA can significantly underestimate the amplitude and period of noise-induced oscillations in genetic oscillators. We also identify cases where the LNA predicts that noise levels can be optimized by tuning a bimolecular rate constant whereas our method shows that no such regulation is possible. All our results are confirmed by stochastic simulations.ConclusionThe software iNA allows the investigation of parameter regimes where the LNA fares well and where it does not. We have shown that the parametric dependence of the coefficients of variation and Fano factors for common gene regulatory networks is better described by including terms of higher order than LNA in the system size expansion. This analysis is considerably faster than stochastic simulations due to the extensive ensemble averaging needed to obtain statistically meaningful results. Hence iNA is well suited for performing computationally efficient and quantitative studies of intrinsic noise in gene regulatory networks.

Project description:BackgroundPresent knowledge indicates a multilayered hierarchical gene regulatory network (ML-hGRN) often operates above a biological pathway. Although the ML-hGRN is very important for understanding how a pathway is regulated, there is almost no computational algorithm for directly constructing ML-hGRNs.ResultsA backward elimination random forest (BWERF) algorithm was developed for constructing the ML-hGRN operating above a biological pathway. For each pathway gene, the BWERF used a random forest model to calculate the importance values of all transcription factors (TFs) to this pathway gene recursively with a portion (e.g. 1/10) of least important TFs being excluded in each round of modeling, during which, the importance values of all TFs to the pathway gene were updated and ranked until only one TF was remained in the list. The above procedure, termed BWERF. After that, the importance values of a TF to all pathway genes were aggregated and fitted to a Gaussian mixture model to determine the TF retention for the regulatory layer immediately above the pathway layer. The acquired TFs at the secondary layer were then set to be the new bottom layer to infer the next upper layer, and this process was repeated until a ML-hGRN with the expected layers was obtained.ConclusionsBWERF improved the accuracy for constructing ML-hGRNs because it used backward elimination to exclude the noise genes, and aggregated the individual importance values for determining the TFs retention. We validated the BWERF by using it for constructing ML-hGRNs operating above mouse pluripotency maintenance pathway and Arabidopsis lignocellulosic pathway. Compared to GENIE3, BWERF showed an improvement in recognizing authentic TFs regulating a pathway. Compared to the bottom-up Gaussian graphical model algorithm we developed for constructing ML-hGRNs, the BWERF can construct ML-hGRNs with significantly reduced edges that enable biologists to choose the implicit edges for experimental validation.

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Phenotype accessibility and noise in random threshold gene regulatory networks.

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