Eui Min Jeong, Temperature compensation through kinetic regulation in biochemical oscillators.

In this talk, we discuss the paper “Temperature compensation through kinetic regulation in biochemical oscillators” by HaochenFu, Chenyi Fei, Qi Ouyang, and Yuhai Tu, to appear in PNAS. 

Abstract 

Although individual kinetic rates in biochemical reactions are sensitive to temperature, most circadian clocks exhibit a relatively constant period across a wide range of temperatures, a phenomenon called temperature compensation (TC). However, it remains unclear how different biochemical oscillators achieve TC. In this study, using representative biochemical oscillator models with different underlying reaction networks, we demonstrate a general kinetic regulation mechanism for TC regardless of the network structure. We find that by driving the system into a regime far from onset where the period increases strongly with at least one of the kinetic rates in the system to balance its inverse dependence on other rates, robust TC can be achieved for a wide range of parameters in different networks.