Deep-learning-assisted Sort-Seq enables high-throughput profiling of gene expression characteristics with high precision.

Journal: Science advances
PMID:

Abstract

Owing to the nondeterministic and nonlinear nature of gene expression, the steady-state intracellular protein abundance of a clonal population forms a distribution. The characteristics of this distribution, including expression strength and noise, are closely related to cellular behavior. However, quantitative description of these characteristics has so far relied on arrayed methods, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address this issue, we propose a deep-learning-assisted Sort-Seq approach (dSort-Seq) in this work, enabling high-throughput profiling of expression properties with high precision. We demonstrated the validity of dSort-Seq for large-scale assaying of the dose-response relationships of biosensors. In addition, we comprehensively investigated the contribution of transcription and translation to noise production in , from which we found that the expression noise is strongly coupled with the mean expression level. We also found that the transcriptional interference caused by overlapping RpoD-binding sites contributes to noise production, which suggested the existence of a simple and feasible noise control strategy in .

Authors

  • Huibao Feng
    MOE Key Laboratory for Industrial Biocatalysis, Institute of Biochemical Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
  • Fan Li
    Department of Instrument Science and Engineering, School of SEIEE, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
  • Tianmin Wang
    Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
  • Xin-Hui Xing
    Key Laboratory for Industrial Biocatalysis, Ministry of Education, Department of Chemical Engineering, Center for Synthetic & Systems Biology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • An-Ping Zeng
    Institute of Bioprocess and Biosystems Engineering, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg 21073, Germany.
  • Chong Zhang
    Department of Big Data Management and Application, School of International Economics and Management, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing 100048, China.