Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: 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. 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.
Source: PLoS ONE
Institutions: Gladstone Institutes, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Rockefeller University, QB3, University of California, San Francisco
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,382
Awards: Molecular Biophysics Training Grant, Developing Transmissible Antivirals by Exploiting Gene-Expression Circuitry, G3899438720, The Role of Transcriptional Noise in the Establishment of HIV-1 Latency, G7538388732, Screening for modulators of Tat positive feedback for biasing HIV latency, UCSF-Bay Area Center for AIDS Research
OpenAlex ID: W1863332503