Quantifying how post-transcriptional noise and gene copy number variation bias transcriptional parameter inference from mRNA distributions
- East China University of Science and Technology, China
- Oncode Institute, Netherlands
- University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Abstract
Transcriptional rates are often estimated by fitting the distribution of mature mRNA numbers measured using smFISH (single molecule fluorescence in situ hybridization) with the distribution predicted by the telegraph model of gene expression, which defines two promoter states of activity and inactivity. However, fluctuations in mature mRNA numbers are strongly affected by processes downstream of transcription. In addition, the telegraph model assumes one gene copy, but in experiments cells may have two gene copies as cells replicate their genome during the cell cycle. Whilst it is often presumed that post-transcriptional noise and gene copy number variation affect transcriptional parameter estimation, the size of the error introduced remains unclear. To address this issue, here we measure both mature and nascent mRNA distributions of GAL10 in yeast cells using smFISH and classify each cell according to its cell cycle phase. We infer transcriptional parameters from mature and nascent mRNA distributions, with and without accounting for cell cycle phase and compare the results to live-cell transcription measurements of the same gene. We find that: (i) correcting for cell cycle dynamics decreases the promoter switching rates and the initiation rate, and increases the fraction of time spent in the active state, as well as the burst size; (ii) additional correction for post-transcriptional noise leads to further increases in the burst size and to a large reduction in the errors in parameter estimation. Furthermore, we outline how to correctly adjust for measurement noise in smFISH due to uncertainty in transcription site localisation when introns cannot be labelled. Simulations with parameters estimated from nascent smFISH data, which is corrected for cell cycle phases and measurement noise, leads to autocorrelation functions that agree with those obtained from live-cell imaging.
Data availability
The 4 smFISH datasets are available from https://osf.io/d5nvj/. These datasets include the maximum intensity projected images, the spot localization results, the nuclear and cellular masks used for merged, G1 and G2 cells and the analyzed results of the mature and nascent data. The analysis code of the smFISH microscopy data is available at https://github.com/Lenstralab/smFISH. The code for the the synthetic simulations and the parameter inference is available at https://github.com/palmtree2013/RNAInferenceTool.jl.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (61988101)
- Xiaoming Fu
- Libin Xu
- Zhixing Cao
National Natural Science Foundation of China (6207313)
- Xiaoming Fu
- Libin Xu
- Zhixing Cao
H2020 European Research Council (755695 BURSTREG)
- Tineke L Lenstra
Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2020-327)
- Ramon Grima
Shanghai Action Plan for Technological Innovation Grant (22ZR1415300)
- Xiaoming Fu
- Libin Xu
- Zhixing Cao
Shanghai Action Plan for Technological Innovation Grant (22511104000)
- Xiaoming Fu
- Libin Xu
- Zhixing Cao
Shanghai Sailing Program (22YF1410700)
- Xiaoming Fu
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Fu et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,275
- views
-
- 206
- downloads
-
- 42
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Quantifying how post-transcriptional noise and gene copy number variation bias transcriptional parameter inference from mRNA distributions
eLife 11:e82493.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.82493
Further reading
-
- Biochemistry and Chemical Biology
- Computational and Systems Biology
Protein–protein interactions are fundamental to understanding the molecular functions and regulation of proteins. Despite the availability of extensive databases, many interactions remain uncharacterized due to the labor-intensive nature of experimental validation. In this study, we utilized the AlphaFold2 program to predict interactions among proteins localized in the nuage, a germline-specific non-membrane organelle essential for piRNA biogenesis in Drosophila. We screened 20 nuage proteins for 1:1 interactions and predicted dimer structures. Among these, five represented novel interaction candidates. Three pairs, including Spn-E_Squ, were verified by co-immunoprecipitation. Disruption of the salt bridges at the Spn-E_Squ interface confirmed their functional importance, underscoring the predictive model’s accuracy. We extended our analysis to include interactions between three representative nuage components—Vas, Squ, and Tej—and approximately 430 oogenesis-related proteins. Co-immunoprecipitation verified interactions for three pairs: Mei-W68_Squ, CSN3_Squ, and Pka-C1_Tej. Furthermore, we screened the majority of Drosophila proteins (~12,000) for potential interaction with the Piwi protein, a central player in the piRNA pathway, identifying 164 pairs as potential binding partners. This in silico approach not only efficiently identifies potential interaction partners but also significantly bridges the gap by facilitating the integration of bioinformatics and experimental biology.
-
- Computational and Systems Biology
- Neuroscience
Accumulating evidence to make decisions is a core cognitive function. Previous studies have tended to estimate accumulation using either neural or behavioral data alone. Here, we develop a unified framework for modeling stimulus-driven behavior and multi-neuron activity simultaneously. We applied our method to choices and neural recordings from three rat brain regions—the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), the frontal orienting fields (FOF), and the anterior-dorsal striatum (ADS)—while subjects performed a pulse-based accumulation task. Each region was best described by a distinct accumulation model, which all differed from the model that best described the animal’s choices. FOF activity was consistent with an accumulator where early evidence was favored while the ADS reflected near perfect accumulation. Neural responses within an accumulation framework unveiled a distinct association between each brain region and choice. Choices were better predicted from all regions using a comprehensive, accumulation-based framework and different brain regions were found to differentially reflect choice-related accumulation signals: FOF and ADS both reflected choice but ADS showed more instances of decision vacillation. Previous studies relating neural data to behaviorally inferred accumulation dynamics have implicitly assumed that individual brain regions reflect the whole-animal level accumulator. Our results suggest that different brain regions represent accumulated evidence in dramatically different ways and that accumulation at the whole-animal level may be constructed from a variety of neural-level accumulators.
