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. 2016 Apr 8;7:479. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2016.00479

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Copyright © 2016 Bandiera, Furini and Giordano.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

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Noise as a positive regulator of cellular behavior. Variability in protein expression levels among isogenic individuals might improve the overall performance of a cell population. Boxes of different colors are used to represent cells where a protein (or a set of proteins), critical for the cell survival, is differently expressed among the individuals of an isogenic population. When the population is featured by limited phenotypic variability (left hand side of the lower diagram), different cells have comparable expression levels. In a noisy population (right hand side of the lower diagram), the same average expression level, as accessible with bulk measurements, result from a more dispersed distribution of protein concentrations at the single-cell level. If the cell survival depends on the expression level of a given protein (i.e., only cells with expression levels corresponding to light-blue, blue, and purple boxes survive) a noisier population might be more robust to changes in environmental conditions causing selective stress, thereby ensuring the species survival. Similar strategies could be adopted to improve sensing properties in synthetic applications. dead; alive. The reader is referred to (Smits et al., 2006) for additional examples.

Inline graphic — Noise as a positive regulator of cellular behavior. Variability in protein expression levels among isogenic individuals might improve the overall performance of a cell population. Boxes of different colors are used to represent cells where a protein (or a set of proteins), critical for the cell survival, is differently expressed among the individuals of an isogenic population. When the population is featured by limited phenotypic variability (left hand side of the lower diagram), different cells have comparable expression levels. In a noisy population (right hand side of the lower diagram), the same average expression level, as accessible with bulk measurements, result from a more dispersed distribution of protein concentrations at the single-cell level. If the cell survival depends on the expression level of a given protein (i.e., only cells with expression levels corresponding to light-blue, blue, and purple boxes survive) a noisier population might be more robust to changes in environmental conditions causing selective stress, thereby ensuring the species survival. Similar strategies could be adopted to improve sensing properties in synthetic applications. dead; alive. The reader is referred to (Smits et al., 2006) for additional examples.