Burger, AnatWalczak, Aleksandra M.Wolynes, Peter G.2017-08-022017-08-022012Burger, Anat, Walczak, Aleksandra M. and Wolynes, Peter G.. "Influence of decoys on the noise and dynamics of gene expression." <i>Physical Review E,</i> 86, no. 4 (2012) American Physical Society: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.86.041920.https://hdl.handle.net/1911/96163Many transcription factors bind to DNA with a remarkable lack of specificity, so that regulatory binding sites compete with an enormous number of nonregulatory “decoy” sites. For an autoregulated gene, we show decoy sites decrease noise in the number of unbound proteins to a Poisson limit that results from binding and unbinding. This noise buffering is optimized for a given protein concentration when decoys have a 1/2 probability of being occupied. Decoys linearly increase the time to approach steady state and exponentially increase the time to switch epigenetically between bistable states.engArticle is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.Journal articleInfluence_decoys_noise_dynamics_gene_expressionhttps://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.86.041920