What Is a Transcriptional Burst?
Open accessAbstract
The idea that gene activity can be discontinuous will not surprise many biologists - many genes are restricted in when and where they can be expressed. Yet during the past 15 years, a collection of observations compiled under the umbrella term 'transcriptional bursting' has received considerable interest. Direct visualization of the dynamics of discontinuous transcription has expanded our understanding of basic transcriptional mechanisms and their regulation and provides a real-time readout of gene activity during the life of a cell. In this review, we try to reconcile the different views of the transcriptional process emerging from studies of bursting, and how this work contextualizes the relative importance of different regulatory inputs to normal dynamic ranges of gene activity.
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Transcription itself is discontinuous, occurring in bursts during which RNAP complexes transcribe one by one from the TSS producing one or more transcripts, followed by a period of transcriptional silence.
“transcription itself is discontinuous, occurring in “bursts” during which RNAP complexes transcribe one by one from the TSS producing one or more transcripts, followed by a period of transcriptional silence (reviewed in [515]).”
From Transcriptional enhancers and their communication with gene promoters (2021) · cites this paper as [515]
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Time-resolved single-cell RNA-seq using metabolic RNA labelling
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- Authors
- Tunnacliffe, E., & Chubb, J. R.
- Affiliations
- John Radcliffe Hospital (GB)
- MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Tunnacliffe, Edward
- Venue
- Trends in Genetics
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2020-04
- Volume
- 36
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 288-297
- ISSN
- 0168-9525 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3005287223
- Cited by
- 223
- References
- 8
- Citations by year
- 2026: 28 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 50 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 34 · 2020: 12
- FWCI
- 2.61
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- discovery.ucl.ac.uk
- Locations
- Trends in Genetics (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust (202867/Z/16/Z, MC_U12266B)
- Medical Research Council (MC_UU_12009/4, MC_U12266B)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Gene Regulatory Network Analysis
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Genetics › Bacterial Genetics and Biotechnology
- Keywords
- transcriptional bursting, gene expression dynamics, discontinuous transcription, transcriptional regulation, gene activity, single-molecule imaging, transcriptional noise, gene expression variation
- MeSH terms
- Gene Expression Regulation, RNA, Transcription, Genetic, Transcriptional Activation
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