Intrinsic noise in gene regulatory networks

Mukund Thattai, Alexander van Oudenaarden

2001 · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 1,521 citations

Cells are intrinsically noisy biochemical reactors: low reactant numbers can lead to significant statistical fluctuations in molecule numbers and reaction rates. Here we use an analytic model to investigate the emergent noise properties of genetic systems. We find for a single gene that noise is essentially determined at the translational level, and that the mean and variance of protein concentration can be independently controlled. The noise strength immediately following single gene induction is almost twice the final steady-state value. We find that fluctuations in the concentrations of a…

Read the paper →

Explore this paper's citation graph on Constellation.