ArticlePLoS genetics2012
A genome-wide analysis of promoter-mediated phenotypic noise in Escherichia coli.
Article in PLoS genetics, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 115 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
115 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 202 citations in OpenAlex.
- Un-biased housekeeping gene panel selection for high-validity gene expression analysis.Scientific reports · 2022Pooled it
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- Fast, StreamlinedChemical & biomedical imaging · 2026Article
- Molecular evolution in light of regulatory-coding epistasis.EMBO reports · 2026Review
- Heterogeneity in microbial antibiotic responses: genetic basis and within-host evolution.Trends in genetics : TIG · 2026Review
- Phenotypic plasticity trade-offs in an age-structured model of bacterial growth under stress.Journal of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Inter-individual gene expression variability implies stable regulation of brain-biased genes across organs in three ray-finned fishes.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Overriding Bioprocess Perturbations With a Cell-Machine Interface for Reliable Microbial Stress-Response Control.Microbial biotechnology · 2026Article
- Single-cell phenotypic heterogeneity shapes quorum signaling dynamics in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- Decoding the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of bacterial virulence gene expression using single-cell approaches.Frontiers in microbiology · 2026Review
- Single cell profiling framework reveals metabolic subpopulations as drivers of bioproduction heterogeneity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Congruence between noise and plasticity in protein expression.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Evaluating the predictive power of combined gene expression dynamics from single cells on antibiotic survival.mSystems · 2025Article
- Why AGG is associated with high transgene output: passenger effects and their implications for transgene design.NAR genomics and bioinformatics · 2025Article
- Profiling Salmonella transcriptional dynamics during macrophage infection using a comprehensive reporter library.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Gene syntaxes modulate gene expression and circuit behavior on plasmids.Journal of biological engineering · 2025Article
- Genetic properties underlying transcriptional variability across different perturbations.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The impact of phenotypic heterogeneity on fungal pathogenicity and drug resistance.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2025Review
- Programming CRISPRi to control the lifecycle of bacteriophage T7.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
55 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
7 authors at 4 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Gene expression is subject to random perturbations that lead to fluctuations in the rate of protein production. As a consequence, for any given protein, genetically identical organisms living in a constant environment will contain different amounts of that particular protein, resulting in different phenotypes. This phenomenon is known as "phenotypic noise." In bacterial systems, previous studies have shown that, for specific genes, both transcriptional and translational processes affect phenotypic noise. Here, we focus on how the promoter regions of genes affect noise and ask whether levels of promoter-mediated noise are correlated with genes' functional attributes, using data for over 60% of all promoters in Escherichia coli. We find that essential genes and genes with a high degree of evolutionary conservation have promoters that confer low levels of noise. We also find that the level of noise cannot be attributed to the evolutionary time that different genes have spent in the genome of E. coli. In contrast to previous results in eukaryotes, we find no association between promoter-mediated noise and gene expression plasticity. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that, in bacteria, natural selection can act to reduce gene expression noise and that some of this noise is controlled through the sequence of the promoter region alone.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.