ArticlePLoS computational biology2016
Macromolecular Crowding Regulates the Gene Expression Profile by Limiting Diffusion.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- Macromolecular Crowding in Cytoplasm and Cellular Organelles.Sub-cellular biochemistry · 2025Pooled it
- Macromolecular crowding alters transcription: real-time measurements with SYBR Green II.Research square · 2026Article
- Leveraging chromatin packing domains to target chemoevasion in vivo.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Multiscale chromatin dynamics and high entropy in plant iPSC ancestors.Journal of cell science · 2024Article
- Size Sensitivity of Metabolite Diffusion in Macromolecular Crowds.Nano letters · 2024Article
- Evaluation of weak interactions of proteins and organic cations with DNA duplex structures.Biophysical journal · 2022Article
- Progress on Crowding Effect in Cell-like Structures.Membranes · 2022Review
- Macromolecular crowding effects on the kinetics of opposing reactions catalyzed by alcohol dehydrogenase.Biochemistry and biophysics reports · 2021Article
- Longer DNA exhibits greater potential for cell-free gene expression.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- A multiscale compartment-based model of stochastic gene regulatory networks using hitting-time analysis.The Journal of chemical physics · 2021Article
- Concentration sensing in crowded environments.Biophysical journal · 2021Article
- Optical and theoretical study of strand recognition by nucleic acid probes.Communications chemistry · 2020Article
- Escherichia coli metabolism under short-term repetitive substrate dynamics: adaptation and trade-offs.Microbial cell factories · 2020Article
- Dynamic Crowding Regulates Transcription.Biophysical journal · 2020Article
- Article
- The indispensable contribution of s38 protein to ovarian-eggshell morphogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- The Role of Chromatin Density in Cell Population Heterogeneity during Stem Cell Differentiation.Scientific reports · 2017Article
- Making microenvironments: A look into incorporating macromolecular crowding into in vitro experiments, to generate biomimetic microenvironments which are capable of directing cell function for tissue engineering applications.Journal of tissue engineeringArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
We seek to elucidate the role of macromolecular crowding in transcription and translation. It is well known that stochasticity in gene expression can lead to differential gene expression and heterogeneity in a cell population. Recent experimental observations by Tan et al. have improved our understanding of the functional role of macromolecular crowding. It can be inferred from their observations that macromolecular crowding can lead to robustness in gene expression, resulting in a more homogeneous cell population. We introduce a spatial stochastic model to provide insight into this process. Our results show that macromolecular crowding reduces noise (as measured by the kurtosis of the mRNA distribution) in a cell population by limiting the diffusion of transcription factors (i.e. removing the unstable intermediate states), and that crowding by large molecules reduces noise more efficiently than crowding by small molecules. Finally, our simulation results provide evidence that the local variation in chromatin density as well as the total volume exclusion of the chromatin in the nucleus can induce a homogenous cell population.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.