This paper from Bill Mather group in the Physics Department at Virginia Tech shows how a genetic oscillator responds to noisy signals. The authors show that the oscillator gets entrained despite the noise affecting the input signal. This is a nice use of an existing oscillator developed in Jeff Hasty’s group. After demonstrating this property of a synthetic genetic network, the paper shows that similar behavior can be expected from natural oscillators by performing numerical simulations of the cAMP oscillations in D. discoideum. It also shows that similar behavior can be expected in the dynamics of entire populations by analyzing a predator-prey model.
It is a little surprising that this paper was published in ACS Synthetic Biology because, even though it uses an artificial gene network as a tool, this is much more a more theoretical paper about general properties of biological oscillators.
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