Extracting Biochemical Parameters in Protein Synthesis Distributions of Vascular Cells

Using data collected in microfluidic platforms, where smooth muscle cells of adult rats are subject to uniform microenvironments in vitro, we analyze the various distributions of proteins which are synthesized during the formation of vascular tissue like collagen and tropoelastin. We compare our results to the theoretical 2-stage model developed in [1] for protein synthesis, under the assumption that the time these proteins take to decay is significantly longer than their corresponding mRNA. As might be expected, we do not find any simple linear correlation between the cell proliferation and protein synthesis. However, using the theoretical model mentioned above, by we are able to extract biochemical parameters that may not be easy to measure, such as the number of mRNA transcribed in a lifetime of a protein, and the number of proteins translated during a mRNA lifetime. References [1] Shahrezaei V. and Swain P.S. (2008). Analytical distributions for stochastic gene expression, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(45), 17256-17261.