E. coli, What a Noisy Bug

摘要

To study gene expression, researchers often grind up a large number of cells grown under the same conditions and then measure the amounts of gene products, such as messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and proteins, in the soup. Many recent studies, however, have pointed out that beneath such ' average measurements lies great variation among individual cells, sometimes referred to as "noise" (1,2).rnIn multicellular organisms, studies of noise have raised questions about how tissue specificity is maintained in the face of great variation (2). In unicellular organisms,rnresearchers have found that noise can give rise to groups of cells within a genetically homogenous population that behave differently (3).