Control of Repressilators’ oscillatory behavior by transcription cooperativityand RNA/protein time scales
Evgeny Volkov, Ilya Potapov, Alexey Kuznetsov
Oscillatory regulatory networks have been discovered in many cellular pathways. An especially challenging area is studying dynamics of cellular oscillators interacting with one another in a population. We study an example of two interacting repressilators (artificial regulatory oscillators based on cyclic repression). We show that changing the cooperativity of transcription repression (Hill coefficient) and reaction timescales dramatically alter synchronization properties. The network becomes birhythmic, i.e. it chooses between the in-phase and anti-phase synchronization, providing means for controlling the oscillatory dynamics.