Oscillatory Behaviors in Genetic Regulatory Networks Mediated by MicroRNA With Time Delays and Reaction-Diffusion Terms.

In this paper, we investigate the oscillatory expression in Escherichia coli mediated by microRNA with time delays and reaction-diffusion terms. First of all, the integrated effects of delays and diffusions are first introduced into the genetic regulatory networks involving microRNAs, and a general model of genetic regulatory networks is then formulated. Second, two functional issues on gene regulatory networks, i.e. stability and oscillation of such model, are addressed in detail, and an explicit algorithm determining the properties of periodic oscillation is also presented. We demonstrate that the oscillatory expression of Escherichia coli is not only crucially dependent on the transcriptional and translational delays, but also heavily influenced by the diffusion coefficients. The conclusion is practically verified by a lot of biological experiments and observations. We also find that if the diffusion coefficients of miRNA, mRNA, and protein are suitably small, it can predict that inhomogeneous periodic oscillations can occur unless there only exhibits spatially homogeneous periodic oscillations. The obtained results indicate that the effects of transcriptional and translational delays are essential factors for designing or controlling genetic regulatory networks, in the meantime the functions of reaction-diffusion must beconsidered. Finally, numerical examples are presented to illustrate and visualize theoretical results.