Speaker
Description
The origins of the protein noise floor – a lower bound for noise in gene expression, experimentally observed in highly expressed genes – are still debated. We propose a minimal model of gene expression in bacteria, which combines several contributions to the stochastic noise in protein levels: Variation in mean protein concentration during cell cycle, translational bursts, protein partitioning at cell division, and cell-cycle age distribution within the population. Our model is capable of predicting the existence of the noise floor and to semi-quantitatively reproduce the shapes of the experimental noise vs. protein concentration plots. Thus, it allows one to disentangle the contributions to the noise floor coming from the specific sources.
[1] J. Jędrak, A. Ochab-Marcinek, Contributions to the 'noise floor' in gene expression in a population of dividing cells, Scientific Reports, 10, 13533 (2020)
