Regulation of stochastic gene bursting by chromatin-independent acetylation

Stochastic transcriptional bursting is now recognized as a universal property of gene expression. While different genes exhibit distinct bursting patterns, the molecular basis for differences in bursting are largely unknown. We have developed and applied a high-throughput-imaging based screening strategy to identify cellular factors and mechanisms that determine the bursting behavior of human genes. Focusing on epigenetic regulators, we find that global acetylation is the strongest acute modulator of burst frequency, size and heterogeneity of bursting. Acetylation similarly affected the Off-time but On-time changes were gene-specific. These effects were not strongly linked to promoter acetylation, which did not correlate with bursting properties and forced promoter acetylation altered bursting for only some genes. Instead, we identified acetylation of the Integrator complex as a key determinant of gene bursting with elevated Integrator acetylation leading to faster bursting. Taken together our results suggest a dominant role of non-histone proteins in determining gene bursting properties and they identify non-epigenetic acetylation of a transcription cofactor as an allosteric modulator of bursting via a pause-release related bursting checkpoint