AND Gates as Sources of Biological Nonlinearity: Relevance to Genetic Dominance.
- 1Institut Jacques Monod, Université Paris Cité, CNRS, Paris, France.
- 2Institut De Biologie François Jacob, Université Paris-Saclay, Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique, Fontenay-aux-Roses, France.
Abstract
AND-gating is a mechanism capable of generating nonlinear biological responses because a productive output requires the joint satisfaction of several necessary molecular events. AND gates are considered here in the context of gene expression. Three minimal architectures are discussed, parallel AND gates, kinetic AND gates, and a serial arrangement of AND gates. In a parallel AND gate, output depends on the simultaneous engagement of several modules. In a kinetic AND gate, output requires the completion of several events within a finite time window. In a serial arrangement, the output of one gate becomes the input of the next. These architectures can generate S-shaped responses even when the elementary processes are non-cooperative. Although transcription is our main focus, the same logic applies to other processes. The sigmoidal responses produced by these AND gates provide a phenomenological explanation for how a reduction in the abundance or activity of a dosage-sensitive molecule can generate more-than-proportional downstream effects, a hallmark of haploinsufficiency (HI), a form of dominance. The same AND-gate logic also sheds light on dominant-negative effects, where a mutant protein interferes with its wild-type counterpart. These models illustrate how AND gate architectures can contribute to biological threshold generation and to nonlinear genotype-phenotype relationships, which underlie dominance.
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BibTeX
@article{toussirt2026gates,
title = {{AND Gates as Sources of Biological Nonlinearity: Relevance to Genetic Dominance.}},
author = {Anis Toussirt and Reiner A Veitia},
journal = {Advanced biology},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.1002/adbi.70168},
url = {https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42929739},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - AND Gates as Sources of Biological Nonlinearity: Relevance to Genetic Dominance.
AU - Anis Toussirt
AU - Reiner A Veitia
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/01
JO - Advanced biology
DO - 10.1002/adbi.70168
UR - https://europepmc.org/article/MED/42929739
AB - AND-gating is a mechanism capable of generating nonlinear biological responses because a productive output requires the joint satisfaction of several necessary molecular events. AND gates are considered here in the context of gene expression. Three minimal architectures are discussed, parallel AND gates, kinetic AND gates, and a serial arrangement of AND gates. In a parallel AND gate, output depends on the simultaneous engagement of several modules. In a kinetic AND gate, output requires the completion of several events within a finite time window. In a serial arrangement, the output of one gate becomes the input of the next. These architectures can generate S-shaped responses even when the elementary processes are non-cooperative. Although transcription is our main focus, the same logic applies to other processes. The sigmoidal responses produced by these AND gates provide a phenomenological explanation for how a reduction in the abundance or activity of a dosage-sensitive molecule can generate more-than-proportional downstream effects, a hallmark of haploinsufficiency (HI), a form of dominance. The same AND-gate logic also sheds light on dominant-negative effects, where a mutant protein interferes with its wild-type counterpart. These models illustrate how AND gate architectures can contribute to biological threshold generation and to nonlinear genotype-phenotype relationships, which underlie dominance.
SN - 2701-0198
ER -