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Noise in gene expression as the source of non‐genetic individuality in the chemotactic response of Escherichia coli
Author(s) -
Levin M.D.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
febs letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.593
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1873-3468
pISSN - 0014-5793
DOI - 10.1016/s0014-5793(03)00857-3
Subject(s) - chemotaxis , escherichia coli , biology , phenotype , gene , transcription (linguistics) , adaptation (eye) , translation (biology) , genetics , signal transduction , messenger rna , biological system , microbiology and biotechnology , neuroscience , linguistics , philosophy , receptor
A deterministic computer model of the signal transduction pathway mediating bacterial chemotaxis was used to examine the variation in both unstimulated swimming behaviour and adaptation time to stimuli in clonal populations of cells. Copy numbers of proteins in the pathway were computed from a simplified model of transcription and translation that predicts greater‐than‐Poissonian statistics. Simulated and experimental individuality data could be brought into good agreement on varying the noise strength of the protein copy number distributions. In the simulations, all the proteins in the pathway are involved to a significant degree in the appearance of phenotypic diversity, although there is a modest decrease in influence with increasing copy number.