Silencing is noisy: population and cell level noise in telomere-adjacent genes is dependent on telomere position and sir2.

ABSTRACT: Cell-to-cell gene expression noise is thought to be an important mechanism for generating phenotypic diversity. Furthermore, telomeric regions are major sites for gene amplification, which is thought to drive genetic diversity. Here we found that individual subtelomeric TLO genes exhibit increased variation in transcript and protein levels at both the cell-to-cell level as well as at the population-level. The cell-to-cell variation, termed Telomere-Adjacent Gene Expression Noise (TAGEN) was largely intrinsic noise and was dependent upon genome position: noise was reduced when a TLO gene was expressed at an ectopic internal locus and noise was elevated when a non-telomeric gene was expressed at a telomere-adjacent locus. This position-dependent TAGEN also was dependent on Sir2p, an NAD+-dep

SUBMITTER: Anderson MZ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4109849 | biostudies-literature | 2014 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature