ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
First-passage time approach to controlling noise in the timing of intracellular events.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 38 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
38 citing papers in PubMed.
- Counting to two: how phages decide between lysis and lysogeny.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inferring single-cell heterogeneity of bacteriophage lysis-associated life-history traits from population-scale dynamics.Science advances · 2026Article
- Rapid transcriptional response to a dynamic morphogen by time integration.Current biology : CB · 2026Article
- Cell Growth and Division Shape mRNA-Protein Correlations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Decoupling between activation time and steady-state level in input-output responses.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Article
- Algebraic formulas for first-passage times of Markov processes in the linear framework.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2025Article
- Decoupling between activation time and steady-state level in input-output responses.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Sequestration of gene products by decoys enhances precision in the timing of intracellular events.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Molecular mechanisms of precise timing in cell lysis.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- A stochastic vs deterministic perspective on the timing of cellular events.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Mechanisms of cell size regulation in slow-growing Escherichia coli cells: discriminating models beyond the adder.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- Article
- Fluctuating landscapes and heavy tails in animal behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Out-of-equilibrium gene expression fluctuations in the presence of extrinsic noise.Physical biology · 2023Article
- Article
- Precise temporal control of neuroblast migration through combined regulation and feedback of a Wnt receptor.eLife · 2023Article
- Single-Cell Approach Reveals Intercellular Heterogeneity in Phage-Producing Capacities.Microbiology spectrum · 2023Article
- The linear framework II: using graph theory to analyse the transient regime of Markov processes.Frontiers in cell and developmental biology · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In the noisy cellular environment, gene products are subject to inherent random fluctuations in copy numbers over time. How cells ensure precision in the timing of key intracellular events despite such stochasticity is an intriguing fundamental problem. We formulate event timing as a first-passage time problem, where an event is triggered when the level of a protein crosses a critical threshold for the first time. Analytical calculations are performed for the first-passage time distribution in stochastic models of gene expression. Derivation of these formulas motivates an interesting question: Is there an optimal feedback strategy to regulate the synthesis of a protein to ensure that an event will occur at a precise time, while minimizing deviations or noise about the mean? Counterintuitively, results show that for a stable long-lived protein, the optimal strategy is to express the protein at a constant rate without any feedback regulation, and any form of feedback (positive, negative, or any combination of them) will always amplify noise in event timing. In contrast, a positive feedback mechanism provides the highest precision in timing for an unstable protein. These theoretical results explain recent experimental observations of single-cell lysis times in bacteriophage [Formula: see text] Here, lysis of an infected bacterial cell is orchestrated by the expression and accumulation of a stable [Formula: see text] protein up to a threshold, and precision in timing is achieved via feedforward rather than feedback control. Our results have broad implications for diverse cellular processes that rely on precise temporal triggering of events.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.