Quantifying heterogeneity of stochastic gene expression

The heterogeneity of stochastic gene expression, which refers to the temporal fluctuation of the gene product and its cell-to-cell variation, has attracted considerable interest from biologists, physicists, and mathematicians. The dynamics of protein production and degradation have been modeled as random processes with transition probabilities. However, there is a gap between theory and phenomena, particularly in terms of analytical formulation and parameter estimation. In this study, we propose a theoretical framework in which we present a basic model of a gene regulatory system, derive a steady-state solution, and provide a Bayesian approach for estimating the model parameters from single-cell experimental data. The proposed framework is demonstrated to be applicable for various scales of single-cell experiments at both the mRNA and protein levels, and it is useful for comparing kinetic parameters across species, genomes, and cell strains.