The circadian oscillator analysed at the single-transcript level

The circadian clock is an endogenous and self-sustained oscillator that anticipates daily environmental cycles and coordinates physiology accordingly. While rhythmic gene expression of circadian genes is well-described in populations of cells, the single-cell mRNA dynamics of multiple core-clock genes remain largely unknown. Here we use single molecule fluorescence in-situ hybridization (smFISH) at multiple time points to measure pairs of core-clock transcripts,Rev-erbα(Nr1d1),Cry1andBmal1, in mouse fibroblasts at single-molecule resolution. The mean mRNA level oscillates over 24 hours for all three genes, but mRNA numbers show considerable spread between cells. While transcript number scales with cell size for all genes, gene-to-gene correlations of mRNA number depends on the gene pair. To account for these features of the data, we develop a probabilistic model for multivariate smFISH mRNA counts that quantifies changes in transcriptional bursting across genes and over circadian time. We identify a mixture model of negative binomials as the preferred model of the mRNA count distributions, which accounts for cell-to-cell heterogeneity, notably in cell size. The paired count data and modelling allows the decomposition of mRNA variability into distinct noise sources, showing that circadian clock time contributes only a small fraction of the total variability in mRNA number between cells. Thus, our results highlight the intrinsic biological challenges in estimating circadian phase from single-cell mRNA counts and suggest that circadian phase in single cells is encoded post-transcriptionally.