Rather than switching between discrete on and off states, gene transcription exists in a spectrum or continuum of states, with a slowly changing initiation rate modulating the levels of activity.

Quantitative super resolution imaging, in live mammalian cells, reveals a direct relationship between protein clustering dynamics and the number of mRNA transcribed at an endogenous gene locus.

The physical distance between genes in individual cells is the major factor driving co-transcriptional bursts, showing a significant degree of correlation for distances below 400 nm.

Drosophila melanogastereven-skipped enhancers control transcriptional bursting by modulating frequency and amplitude, regardless of varying transcription factor inputs, even when mutated to express in embryonic regions not under selective pressure.

Live quantitative monitoring of transcriptional bursting reveals that enhancers responding to different regulators use the same kinetic strategy to produce a complex composite pattern of developmental expression.

TF-DNA binding regulates spatial and temporal gene expression and drives robust pattern formation by modulating transcriptional kinetics via cooperative interactions among weak TF binding sites and tuning bursting rates by reducing the time spent in the ON state.

The hunchback transcription features are compatible with an equilibrium model with a short decay length Bicoid activity gradient as the sole source of positional information, while Zelda and Hunchback speed-up the process by different means.

Increasing periods of neuronal activity progressively weaken and then eliminate synapses through the activation of specific transcription factors and genes.

There are fundamental limits to what can be learned about the origins of transcriptional noise from gene expression data alone, which can be overcome by simultaneously quantifying the abundances of linked molecular species.

Experimental results in Drosophila support a model in which gene expression is fundamentally controlled by morphogens tuning the same transcription parameter for genes that are expressed in highly diverse patterns.