A Theory for Allosteric Temperature-Sensitive Transcriptional Factors

The MWC model is known to robustly model the allosteric transition of proteins. Recently the allostery theory has been shown consistent with transcriptional induction process engineered in E. coli. We are intrigued by the idea of induction through ligand binding that controls protein activity and we want to extend the allostery framework to incorporate protein activity dependence on other parameters such as temperature and light intensity. In this talk, we propose an allostery theory for the repressor activity, treating temperature as an "effective ligand" that could induce an allosteric transition. Specifically, the repressor protein can be treated as a two-state system with different conformational energies and vibrational density of states distributions. We show a potential application of the theory to model the thermal biological switch.