Figure 3.

Proportion of time relative to the cell cycle that the target site is occupied (y-axis) as a function of DNA crowding (x-axis) in the case of mobile obstacles. The number in the inset represents the Pearson coefficient of correlation between crowding and the mean of the proportion of time the O₁ site is occupied. The values indicate that crowding is highly anti-correlated with the proportion of time the target site is occupied, in the sense that higher crowding on the DNA leads to lower occupancy of the target site by cognate TFs. Note that to enhance the visibility, the boxplots are positioned equidistant although the crowding levels are not. We considered four cases with respect to the number of lacI molecules, namely: (A) 1 molecule, (B) 10 molecules, (C) 100 molecules and (D) 1000 molecules.