ArticleNature nanotechnology2016
Macromolecular crowding creates heterogeneous environments of gene expression in picolitre droplets.
Article in Nature nanotechnology, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 59 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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
59 citing papers in PubMed.
- Employing molecular beacons to assess in vitro transcription with single-molecule resolution.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Reconstituting alternative life using the test-bed of cell-free systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Photoactivatable Synthetic Exosomes for RNA-Based Communication Between Artificial Cells and Living Cells.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Macromolecule-Driven Supramolecular Polymerization Induced by Crowding Effects.Angewandte Chemie (International ed. in English) · 2025Article
- Regulating Protein Immobilization During Cell-Free Protein Synthesis in Hyaluronan Microgels.Advanced biology · 2025Article
- Cell-Free Gene Expression: Methods and Applications.Chemical reviews · 2025Review
- Crowding in Anhydrobiosis.Sub-cellular biochemistry · 2025Review
- Challenges in observing transcription-translation for bottom-up synthetic biology.QRB discovery · 2025Review
- Large-scale-integration and collective oscillations of 2D artificial cells.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Controlling phase separations and reactions in trapped microfluidic droplets.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Constrained dynamics of DNA oligonucleotides in phase-separated droplets.Biophysical journal · 2024Article
- Building Synthetic Cells─From the Technology Infrastructure to Cellular Entities.ACS synthetic biology · 2024Review
- Adaptive and Dissipative Hierarchical Population Crowding of Synthetic Protocells through Click-PISA under Gradient Energy Inputs.Nano letters · 2024Article
- Macromolecular Crowding and DNA: Bridging the Gap between In Vitro and In Vivo.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Review
- Noise Minimization in Cell-Free Gene Expression.ACS synthetic biology · 2023Article
- Stress-dependent macromolecular crowding in the mitochondrial matrix.The EMBO journal · 2023Article
- Bottom-Up Synthetic Biology Using Cell-Free Protein Synthesis.Advances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology · 2023Review
- Compartmentalized Cell-Free Expression Systems for Building Synthetic Cells.Advances in biochemical engineering/biotechnology · 2023Article
- High Macromolecular Crowding in Liposomes from Microfluidics.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2022Article
- Progress on Crowding Effect in Cell-like Structures.Membranes · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Understanding the dynamics of complex enzymatic reactions in highly crowded small volumes is crucial for the development of synthetic minimal cells. Compartmentalized biochemical reactions in cell-sized containers exhibit a degree of randomness due to the small number of molecules involved. However, it is unknown how the physical environment contributes to the stochastic nature of multistep enzymatic processes. Here, we present a robust method to quantify gene expression noise in vitro using droplet microfluidics. We study the changes in stochasticity in the cell-free gene expression of two genes compartmentalized within droplets as a function of DNA copy number and macromolecular crowding. We find that decreased diffusion caused by a crowded environment leads to the spontaneous formation of heterogeneous microenvironments of mRNA as local production rates exceed the diffusion rates of macromolecules. This heterogeneity leads to a higher probability of the molecular machinery staying in the same microenvironment, directly increasing the system's stochasticity.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What 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.