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Title: The low noise limit in gene expression

Journal Article · · PLoS ONE
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5]
  1. Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, San Francisco, CA (United States); Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL (United States)
  2. Gladstone Institute of Virology and Immunology, San Francisco, CA (United States); Univ. of California, San Francisco, CA (United States)
  3. Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
  4. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States)
  5. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (United States); The Rockefeller Univ., New York, NY (United States)

Protein noise measurements are increasingly used to elucidate biophysical parameters. Unfortunately noise analyses are often at odds with directly measured parameters. Here we show that these inconsistencies arise from two problematic analytical choices: (i) the assumption that protein translation rate is invariant for different proteins of different abundances, which has inadvertently led to (ii) the assumption that a large constitutive extrinsic noise sets the low noise limit in gene expression. While growing evidence suggests that transcriptional bursting may set the low noise limit, variability in translational bursting has been largely ignored. We show that genome-wide systematic variation in translational efficiency can-and in the case of E. coli does-control the low noise limit in gene expression. Therefore constitutive extrinsic noise is small and only plays a role in the absence of a systematic variation in translational efficiency. Lastly, these results show the existence of two distinct expression noise patterns: (1) a global noise floor uniformly imposed on all genes by expression bursting; and (2) high noise distributed to only a select group of genes.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
1255649
Journal Information:
PLoS ONE, Vol. 10, Issue 10; ISSN 1932-6203
Publisher:
Public Library of ScienceCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 22 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (8)

Fine-tuning of noise in gene expression with nucleosome remodeling journal June 2018
3’-5’ crosstalk contributes to transcriptional bursting posted_content December 2020
Computational Investigation of Environment-Noise Interaction in Single-Cell Organisms: The Merit of Expression Stochasticity Depends on the Quality of Environmental Fluctuations journal January 2018
Homeostasis of protein and mRNA concentrations in growing cells journal October 2018
The Pathway To Establishing HIV Latency Is Critical to How Latency Is Maintained and Reversed journal April 2018
Mammalian gene expression variability is explained by underlying cell state journal February 2020
3 ′-5 ′ crosstalk contributes to transcriptional bursting journal February 2021
Translation initiation events on structured eukaryotic mRNAs generate gene expression noise journal May 2017