Self-organized criticality in a mammalian RNA-interference circuit

RNA interference in mammalian cells, using competing mRNAs and negative feedback, generates self-organized criticality with intermittent, scale-free bursts in single-cell fluorescence.

• Why it matters: Cellular criticality is proposed to enable high sensitivity and information transfer, but how cells reach critical states without fine-tuning is unclear at the cellular level.
• What they did: The authors built a synthetic RNA-interference circuit where a protein repressor’s mRNA competes for shared silencing machinery, and a feedback loop uses queue congestion; theory, stochastic simulations, and human cell-line fluorescence measurements were performed.
• The result: The feedback loop keeps the queue near its critical point despite parameter changes and yields predicted power-law fluorescence distributions, supporting engineered SOC in animal cells and suggesting relevance to natural systems.

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