Nature Genetics
37, 937 - 944 (2005)
Published online: 7 August 2005; | doi:10.1038/ng1616
Contributions of low molecule number and chromosomal positioning to stochastic gene expressionAttila Becskei1, Benjamin B Kaufmann1, 2
& Alexander van Oudenaarden11
Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA. 2
Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Alexander van Oudenaarden avano@mit.edu The presence of low-copy-number regulators and switch-like signal propagation in regulatory networks are expected to increase noise in cellular processes. We developed a noise amplifier that detects fluctuations in the level of low-abundance mRNAs in yeast. The observed fluctuations are not due to the low number of molecules expressed from a gene per se but originate in the random, rare events of gene activation. The frequency of these events and the correlation between stochastic expressions of genes in a single cell depend on the positioning of the genes along the chromosomes. Transcriptional regulators produced by such random expression propagate noise to their target genes.
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