ArticleNature2014
Stochasticity of metabolism and growth at the single-cell level.
Article in Nature, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 198 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
198 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Pooled it
- Bacterial growth rate in populations and single cells.Nature microbiology · 2026Review
- Emergent phenotypic heterogeneity in synthetic cross-feeding consortia driven by heterogeneous metabolite distribution.National science review · 2026Article
- Bacterial Sentience Is Determined by the Stochastic, Chaotic, and Deterministic Behavior of Cytoplasmic Particles.Current issues in molecular biology · 2026Review
- A coma pattern-based autofocusing method resolves bacterial cold shock response at single-cell level.eLife · 2026Article
- Thermo-Responsive Living Microspheroids Enable a Regenerative Living Disk-Drive System for DNA Data Storage.Advanced materials (Deerfield Beach, Fla.) · 2026Article
- Multi-Scale Hybrid Modeling to Predict Cell Culture Process With Metabolic Phase Transitions.Biotechnology and bioengineering · 2026Article
- Article
- An Analytical Framework for Phenotypic Selection of Fitness-Conferring Genes.Bulletin of mathematical biology · 2026Article
- Cell Growth and Division Shape mRNA-Protein Correlations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Synergy and antagonism in a genome-scale model of metabolic hijacking by bacteriophages.Science advances · 2026Article
- Stochasticity in mammalian cell growth rates drives cell-to-cell variability independently of cell size and divisions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Cell Population Dynamics Informed by Cell-Cycle Regulation: A Deterministic Modeling Toolkit.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2026Review
- Exploring single-cell biosynthetic noise and dynamics for enhanced betaxanthin production in Escherichia coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- TrackRefiner a tool for refinement of bacillus cell tracking data.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2025Article
- Doblin: inferring dominant clonal lineages from high-resolution DNA barcoding time series.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Evaluating the predictive power of combined gene expression dynamics from single cells on antibiotic survival.mSystems · 2025Article
- Article
- Bacteriophage-driven microbial phenotypic heterogeneity: ecological and biogeochemical importance.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2025Review
- Growth rate controls the sensitivity of gene regulatory circuits.Science advances · 2025Article
138 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Elucidating the role of molecular stochasticity in cellular growth is central to understanding phenotypic heterogeneity and the stability of cellular proliferation. The inherent stochasticity of metabolic reaction events should have negligible effect, because of averaging over the many reaction events contributing to growth. Indeed, metabolism and growth are often considered to be constant for fixed conditions. Stochastic fluctuations in the expression level of metabolic enzymes could produce variations in the reactions they catalyse. However, whether such molecular fluctuations can affect growth is unclear, given the various stabilizing regulatory mechanisms, the slow adjustment of key cellular components such as ribosomes, and the secretion and buffering of excess metabolites. Here we use time-lapse microscopy to measure fluctuations in the instantaneous growth rate of single cells of Escherichia coli, and quantify time-resolved cross-correlations with the expression of lac genes and enzymes in central metabolism. We show that expression fluctuations of catabolically active enzymes can propagate and cause growth fluctuations, with transmission depending on the limitation of the enzyme to growth. Conversely, growth fluctuations propagate back to perturb expression. Accordingly, enzymes were found to transmit noise to other unrelated genes via growth. Homeostasis is promoted by a noise-cancelling mechanism that exploits fluctuations in the dilution of proteins by cell-volume expansion. The results indicate that molecular noise is propagated not only by regulatory proteins but also by metabolic reactions. They also suggest that cellular metabolism is inherently stochastic, and a generic source of phenotypic heterogeneity.
Indexed as
Identifiers
25186725What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.