Regulation of mean and noise of the in vivo kinetics of transcription under the control of the lac/ara‐1 promoter

The kinetics of transcription initiation in Escherichia coli depend on the duration of two rate‐limiting steps, the closed and the open complex formation. In a lac promoter variant, P lac/ara‐1 , the kinetics of these steps is controlled by IPTG and arabinose. From in vivo single‐RNA measurements, we find that induction affects the mean and normalized variance of the intervals between consecutive RNA productions. Transcript production is sub‐Poissonian in all conditions tested. The kinetics of each step is independently controlled by a different inducer. We conclude that the regulatory mechanism of P lac/ara‐1 allows the stochasticity of gene expression to be environment‐dependent.

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