Multistability

Experiments in yeast show that introns have a role in inducing phenotypic heterogeneity and that intron-mediated regulation of ribosomal proteins confers a fitness advantage by enabling yeast populations to diversify under nutrient-scarce conditions.

A promising strategy to increase product synthesis from bacteria uses inducible systems to switch metabolism to production. Here, the authors use models to show how engineering positive feedback loops into the genetic circuitry creates a switch that requires only temporary induction with a cheap nutrient to switch metabolism irreversibly, and so drastically reduce inducer use and cost.

Tropical rainforests partly create their own climatic conditions by promoting precipitation, therefore rainforest losses may trigger dramatic shifts. Here the authors combine remote sensing, hydrological modelling, and atmospheric moisture tracking simulations to assess forest-rainfall feedbacks in three major tropical rainforest regions on Earth and simulate potential changes under a severe climate change scenario.

Synthetic circuits based on CRISPRi have not achieved multistable and dynamic behaviors. Here the authors build an oscillator, a toggle switch and an incoherent feed-forward loop using CRISPRi, and provide a mathematical model suggesting that unspecific binding in CRISPRi enables multistability.