Functional roles for noise in genetic circuits

By A. Eldar, Michael B. Elowitz. Nature, 2010

1,502 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The genetic circuits that regulate cellular functions are subject to stochastic fluctuations, or ‘noise’, in the levels of their components. Noise, far from just a nuisance, has begun to be appreciated for its essential role in key cellular activities. Noise functions in both microbial and eukaryotic cells, in multicellular development, and in evolution. It enables coordination of gene expression across large regulons, as well as probabilistic differentiation strategies that function across cell populations. At the longest timescales, noise may facilitate evolutionary transitions. Here we review examples and emerging principles that connect noise, the architecture of the gene circuits in which it is present, and the biological functions it enables. We further indicate some of the important challenges and opportunities going forward.

Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cb9e44e914f64a180ed6d03af58e5fc1a5afdd2d

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Citations in the corpus

Design and Analysis of Single-Cell Sequencing Experiments. (2015, background): “Moreover, even cells of the same type can show substantial gene expression variability leading to phenotypic variation (Eldar and Elowitz, 2010; Munsky et al., 2012; Snijder and Pelkmans, 2011).”
Single-cell RNA sequencing technologies and bioinformatics pipelines (2018, background): “Increasing evidence further suggests that gene expression is heterogeneous, even in similar cell types 1 – 3 ; and this stochastic expression re ﬂ ects cell type composition and can also trigger cell fate decisions 4,5 .”
Identifying sources of variation and the flow of information in biochemical networks (2012, background): “If YH 1 then is the history ofY 1 up to time t, the expected contribution of fluctuations in Y 1 to the variation of Z at time t is EfV 1⁄2ZðtÞ − V 1⁄2ZðtÞjYH 1 g; [1]”
Molecular mechanisms underlying bacterial persisters. (2014, neutral): “, positive feedback) are involved (Eldar and Elowitz, 2010).”
Principles of maximum entropy and maximum caliber in statistical physics (2013, neutral): “…Vergassola, Villermaux, and Shraiman, 2007; Sanchez and Kondev, 2008; Shahrezaei and Swain, 2008; Southworth and Agard, 2008; Moffitt et al., 2009; Tkacik, Walczak, and Bialek, 2009; Eldar and Elowitz, 2010; Walczak, Tkacik, and Bialek, 2010; Yu et al., 2010; Bustamante, Cheng, and Mejia, 2011).”
The Human Cell Atlas (2017, neutral): “…appropriate sense—although not identical, owing to differences in physiological states (e.g., cell-cycle stage), the inherent noise in molecular systems (Eldar and Elowitz, 2010; Kharchenko et al., 2014; Kim et al., 2015; Shalek et al., 2013), and measurement errors (Buettner et al., 2015;…”