Cellular Decision-Making and Biological Noise: From Microbes to Mammals

By G. Balázsi, Alexander van Oudenaarden, James J. Collins. Cell, 2011

1,079 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Cellular decision-making is the process wherein cells assume different, functionally important and heritable fates without an associated genetic or environmental difference. Such stochastic cell-fate decisions generate non-genetic cellular diversity, which may be critical for metazoan development as well as optimized microbial resource utilization and survival in a fluctuating, frequently stressful environment. Here we review several examples of cellular decision-making from viruses, bacteria, yeast, lower metazoans and mammals, highlighting the role of regulatory network structure and molecular noise. We propose that cellular decision-making is one of at least three key processes underlying development at various scales of biological organization.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bddb77da6f0fdfa0aefaaf4802f2d06b59b70b10

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Genetics

1. Herbert Levine
2. Ting Lu
3. Xiaona Fang
4. R. Singer
5. Fermín Fulda
6. José N. Onuchic
7. Jin Wang
8. H. Eugene Stanley

In Molecular Biology

1. Ting Lu
2. Xiaona Fang
3. Karsten Kruse
4. Herbert Levine
5. A. Senecal
6. Jeetayu Biswas
7. Maria Vera
8. H. Park

In Plant Science

1. Jin Wang

Citations in the corpus

• Network resilience (2020, background): “For example, negative feedbacks could suppresses noise [359] and positive feedbacks could stabilized differentiated states in cells [349].”
• Single-Cell and Single-Molecule Analysis of Gene Expression Regulation (2016, background): “Cell-to-cell variation in TF concentration leads to differential cell-fate decisions even within isogenic populations (4, 126, 141).”
• Natural Agency: The Case of Bacterial Cognition (2017, background): “Prokaryote cells can attain and maintain functionally relevant states spontaneously, that is, ‘without an associated genetic or environmental difference’ (Balázsi et al. 2011: 910).”
• Implications of the Hybrid Epithelial/Mesenchymal Phenotype in Metastasis (2015, background): “For instance, CDX2 levels in two cells both belonging to TE are most likely to be slightly different because of cellular stochasticity or non-genetic heterogeneity (36).”
• Nonequilibrium physics in biology (2019, background): “…identified with the attractors of the landscape and the cell-fate decision-making process can be quantified by investigating the transitions between the corresponding basins of attraction (Balazsi et al., 2011; Fang et al., 2018; Li and Wang, 2013, 2015; Wang et al., 2010b, 2011; Xu et al., 2014b).”