Dynamics of Chromatin Silencing at Telomeres: Deterministic and Stochastic Aspects

Epigenetic silencing modifications of are often associated with well-defined domains. We study potential mechanisms of formation of boundary of silenced regions. We specially focus on the possibility that some telomeric silencing boundaries are formed in a self-organized manner, as opposed to being defined by specific boundary elements. In particular, we examine systems where a titration-induced feedback can stabilize the boundary of the silenced region. A consequence of having multiple such boundaries is large stochastic cell-to-cell variation of boundary locations. We proceed to make an argument about the nature of the fall-off of the average silencing protein occupancy, coming from such variability, and test the predictions against HA-Sir3 ChIP-seq data from experiments performed on yeast.