The Role of RNA Condensation in Reducing Gene Expression Noise

Abstract

Biomolecular condensates have been shown to play a fundamental role in localizing biochemistry in a cell. RNA is a common constituent of condensates, and can determine their biophysical properties. Functions of biomolecular condensates are varied including activating, inhibiting, and localizing reactions. Recent theoretical work has shown that the phase separation of proteins into droplets can diminish cell to cell variability in protein abundance. However, the extent to which phase separation involving mRNAs may also buffer noise has yet to be explored. In this paper, we introduce a phenomenological model for the phase separation of mRNAs into RNP condensates, and quantify noise suppression as a function of gene expression kinetic parameters. Through stochastic simulations, we highlight the ability for condensates formed from just a handful of mRNAs to regulate the abundance and suppress the fluctuations of proteins. We place particular emphasis on how this mechanism can facilitate efficient transcription by reducing noise even in the situation of infrequent bursts of transcription by exploiting the physics of a concentration-dependent, deterministic phase separation threshold. We investigate two biologically relevant models in which phase separation acts to either "buffer" noise by storing mRNA in inert droplets, or "filter" phase separated mRNAs by accelerating their decay, and quantify expression noise as a function of kinetic parameters. In either case the most efficient expression occurs when bursts produce mRNAs close the phase separation threshold, which we find to be broadly consistent with observations of an RNP-droplet forming cyclinin multinucleate Ashbya gossypii cells. We finally consider the contribution of noise in the phase separation threshold, and show that protein copy number noise can be suppressed by phase separation threshold fluctuations in certain conditions.