Multiple shorter steps are better at preserving oscillations.
Oudenaarden/Macmillan
Each transcriptional wave from a yeast cell cycle promoter lasts 20–25 min; so stringing together 3 or 4 of them should allow the construction of a simple 90-min cell cycle. But, says van Oudenaarden, “if you didn't optimize the system, the cell cycle waves get washed out very easily. Within a quarter or a third of a 90-minute cycle, the waves are almost completely gone.”
Rather than investigating every last detail of real cell cycle oscillators, the MIT group built, both in yeast cells and in silico, a simple circuit that transmits cell cycle–like oscillations. They found that a slow process such as transcription (and the lengthy persistence of the resulting...
