Michael L. Simpson

Synergistic interactions between confinement and macromolecular crowding spatially order transcription and translation in cell-free expression

This paper demonstrates that macromolecular crowding and confinement in cell-free systems can spatially organize transcription and translation, mimicking prokaryotic nucleoid behavior.

Non-latching positive feedback enables robust bimodality by de-coupling expression noise from the mean

The paper investigates how HIV's Tat protein generates bimodal expression through non-latching positive feedback, decoupling noise from mean expression to maintain stochastic bimodality.

Transcriptional bursting explains the noise-versus-mean relationship in mRNA and protein levels

The paper re-examines HIV LTR mRNA and protein expression data, finding that noise scales inversely with mean expression, supporting the inverse correlation between noise and mean.