Figure 6

The effect of the genome on the reporter transcript output. The effect of the genome on the reporter transcript output. At small enough binding constants neither model is able to produce a significant number of transcripts: the average time between transcriptions is much larger than the doubling time, leading to an average of much less than one transcript per cell division. As the binding constant increases, the reporter promoter starts to compete with the genomic promoters for RNA polymerase, ultimately producing a difference in the number of transcripts between models. The above example has been arbitrarily chosen; it uses the same parameters as in Figure 2 (doubling time = 24 min; plasmid copy number = 10; gene length = 10 bp; and mRNA half-life = 6 min). The error bars are a single standard deviation in the transcript number distributions generated by the stochastic simulations.