Kavli Affiliate: Ariel Amir
| First 5 Authors: Wencheng Ji, Ori Hachmo, Naama Barkai, Ariel Amir,
| Summary:
Transcription Factors (TFs) are proteins that regulate gene expression. The
regulation mechanism is via the binding of a TF to a specific part of the gene
associated with it, the TF’s target. For the regulation to be effective, the TF
has to be able to bind to the correct target and it should do so fast enough to
allow the cell an appropriate reaction time to, e.g., the discovery or food or
the detection of toxins. At the same time, the search process is limited to
diffusive (slow) motion and to an environment saturated with “false" targets,
other parts of the DNA with similar sequences. In eukaryotic cells many TFs
have an Intrinsically Disordered Region (IDR), –a long polymeric “tail"
constructed of hundreds of amino acids. The IDR of certain TFs were shown to
take a key part in the search process and in this letter we develop a model
that attempts to explain its contribution. We show that the IDR enables high
affinity of the TF for its corresponding target and that the manner in which it
does so could also shorten the search time.
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