Influence of temperature on transcription, protein binding and decay rates

Question

I am the kind of biologist who doesn't know much about molecular genetics and about the dynamic of biochemical reactions.

Question

My question concerns the influence of temperature on the dynamic of molecular genetic processes. Typically, I'd like to know how (quantitatively speaking, looking for the $Q_{10}$ for example) the following parameters get modified with temperature.

• rate of transcription
  • UPDATE See How is the rate of transcription influenced by temperature?
• protein binding to a DNA-binding-motif
  • UPDATE see influence of temperature on protein binding and decay rates
• rate of protein decay
  • UPDATE see influence of temperature on protein binding and decay rates
• rate of mRNA decay
  • UPDATE answered by @Chris below

Why do I ask this question?

In order to know what kind of default parameters values I should enter for modeling purposes in evolutionary biology. While our scope is large we decided we would consider parameters values that are observed in yeast.

Answer 1

This sounds straightforward when thinking about it but finding hard evidence is not really easy. As this is too long for a comment, I have to put it in as an answer. Just a few thoughts: All enzymatic reactions are of course temperature dependent and usually have a temperature optimum at the specific living temperatures. For yeast this is around 27°C, for thermophiles this is much higher. For transcription an number of other factors including accessibility of the chromatin and the availability of cofactors play an important role besides the higher activity of one enzyme. This paper might be interesting for you: "Direct measurement of transcription rates reveals multiple mechanisms for configuration of the Arabidopsis ambient temperature response".

DNA binding should be a statistical process between association and dissociation at a given binding site. At higher temperatures the turn-over at the binding site should be higher (because there is more energy available to promote dissociation). T

• The thermodynamics of DNA structural motifs
• Thermodynamics of specific and nonspecific DNA binding by two DNA-binding domains conjugated to fluorescent probes.