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Gene expression

Where does all this noise come from?

Nature Reviews Genetics volume 7, pages 80–81 (2006)Cite this article

Noise, or variability in gene expression, is of two kinds: 'intrinsic' noise derives from the natural variability in the way that molecules interact, whereas 'extrinsic' noise arises from random fluctuations in the environment, or the effect of regulatory inputs that are common to multiple genes. It is extrinsic noise that the authors wanted to pin down.

The approach was to generate five lines of yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae), each of which contains a different number of an identical galactose-inducible transgene, inserted at the same chromosomal location. The expression of the construct is measured, at the single-cell level, by GFP fluorescence, and the origin of variability is measured by analysing the scaling of the noise strength with the copy number of the transgene: if there is no extrinsic noise, then the coefficient of variation for the fluorescence (defined as the ratio of the variance to the mean squared) in a population of cells would be inversely proportional to the number of transgene copies and amount of inducer.

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References

ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Volfson, D. & Marciniak, J. et al. Origins of extrinsic variability in eukaryotic gene expression. Nature 21 December 2005 (10.1038/nature04281)

FURTHER READING

  1. Martinez Arias, A. & Hayward, P. Filtering transcriptional noise during development: concepts and mechanisms. Nature Rev. Genet. 7, 34–44 (2006)

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Authors
  1. Tanita Casci
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Casci, T. Where does all this noise come from?. Nat Rev Genet 7, 80–81 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1790

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg1790

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