Impact of gene expression noise on organismal fitness and the efficacy of natural selection.

ABSTRACT: Gene expression noise is a universal phenomenon across all life forms. Although beneficial under certain circumstances, expression noise is generally thought to be deleterious. However, neither the magnitude of the deleterious effect nor the primary mechanism of this effect is known. Here, we model the impact of expression noise on the fitness of unicellular organisms by considering the influence of suboptimal expressions of enzymes on the rate of biomass production and the energetic cost associated with imprecise amounts of protein synthesis. Our theoretical modeling and empirical analysis of yeast data show four findings. (i) Expression noise reduces the mean fitness of a cell by at least 25%, and this reduction cannot be substantially alleviated by gene overexpression. (ii) Higher sensi

SUBMITTER: Wang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3080991 | biostudies-literature | 2011 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature