Statistical Mechanics on the Regulation of Gene Expression

Abstract

In recent years it has been shown that genetic information can be inherited through the transcriptional state of the DNA, which can be either active or silenced. This is controlled by chemical reactions of acetylation, which allows transcription, and methylation, which blocks it. We have reproduced a computational model for this description and found that, in the thermodynamic limit, a phase transition between the active and the silenced state should take place. Due to the lack of physical frameworks to this problem, in this article we propose (up to our knowledge) the rst statistical mechanics description based on an Ising model. We identify which is the critical temper- ature of our system at which the phase transition occurs and discuss it in relation to experimental data.