Noise propagation in transcriptional cascades

The flow of information through a biological network can greatly influence the operation and behavior of the system. The synthetic transcriptional cascades of various lengths and study of their dynamic and steady state behavior both experimentally and through a stochastic model are presented. These systems are used to analyze sensitivity and noise propagation as a function of synthetic network complexity. The steady state switching behavior that becomes sharper with longer cascades is demonstrated experimentally. The experimental results demonstrating the network properties correlate well with the simulated model.