ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2011
Impact of gene expression noise on organismal fitness and the efficacy of natural selection.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 125 papers.
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125 citing papers in PubMed, 214 citations in OpenAlex.
- Emergent phenotypic heterogeneity in synthetic cross-feeding consortia driven by heterogeneous metabolite distribution.National science review · 2026Article
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- Environmental impacts on gene expression noise and its relationship with fitness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Mistranslation suppresses mistranscription in eukaryotes.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Environmental perturbation increases gene expression variability and unmasks genetic regulation for transcriptional robustness.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Inferring bacterial cell size dynamics across media conditions.Scientific reports · 2026Article
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- Effect of Selection for Low and HighPathogens (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Gene expression and dispersion profiles associated with water consumption and general activity in grazing beef cattle.Tropical animal health and production · 2025Article
- Positioning of negative feedback loops within immune signaling pathways influences gene expression noise.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Stochastic gene expression in proliferating cells: Differing noise intensity in single-cell and population perspectives.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Stress-Induced Constraint on Expression Noise of Essential Genes in E. coli.Journal of molecular evolution · 2024Article
- De Novo Genes.Annual review of genetics · 2024Review
- Bacterial cell size modulation along the growth curve across nutrient conditions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Gene body methylation evolves during the sustained loss of parental care in the burying beetle.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Histone deacetylase Hos2 regulates protein expression noise by potentially modulating the protein translation machinery.Nucleic acids research · 2024Article
- Methylation entropy landscape of Chinese long-lived individuals reveals lower epigenetic noise related to human healthy aging.Aging cell · 2024Article
- Stochastic Gene Expression in Proliferating Cells: Differing Noise Intensity in Single-Cell and Population Perspectives.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Mitigating transcription noise via protein sharing in syncytial cells.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Quantifying transcriptome diversity: a review.Briefings in functional genomics · 2024Review
65 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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 sensitivity of fitness to the expression fluctuations of essential genes than nonessential genes creates stronger selection against noise in essential genes, resulting in a decrease in their noise. (iii) Reduction of expression noise by genome doubling offers a substantial fitness advantage to diploids over haploids, even in the absence of sex. (iv) Expression noise generates fitness variation among isogenic cells, which lowers the efficacy of natural selection similar to the effect of population shrinkage. Thus, expression noise renders organisms both less adapted and less adaptable. Because expression noise is only one of many manifestations of the stochasticity in cellular molecular processes, our results suggest a much more fundamental role of molecular stochasticity in evolution than is currently appreciated.
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