Transcription factors as a consumable for bacteria: How single usage leads to spatial co-location in natural gene networks

In wild-type procaryotes, regulatory genes are found to be spatially co-located. A transcription factor (TF) protein in these networks will have to search for the gene that it regulates by diffusion. In the paper we just published (Stoof2019), we show that this search is slow and often unsuccessful. Having the TF gene so close that it binds when created, can increase binding events and improve overall efficiency. For synthetic procaryotes, we show that relative spatial location is an essential parameter for gene-circuit-dynamics to be predictable and reproducible. Solely increasing gene separation can drastically alter expression behaviour.