Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1LR, UK.
Sainsbury Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1LR, UK.
Trends Plant Sci. 2020 Oct;25(10):1041-1051. doi: 10.1016/j.tplants.2020.04.017. Epub 2020 May 25.
Gene expression in individual cells can be surprisingly noisy. In unicellular organisms this noise can be functional; for example, by allowing a subfraction of the population to prepare for environmental stress. The role of gene expression noise in multicellular organisms has, however, remained unclear. In this review, we discuss how new techniques are revealing an unexpected level of variability in gene expression between and within genetically identical plants. We describe recent progress as well as speculate on the function of transcriptional noise as a mechanism for generating functional phenotypic diversity in plants.
单细胞生物中基因表达的噪音水平可能出人意料地高。这种噪声在单细胞生物中可能具有功能性；例如，它可以使种群中的一部分细胞提前对环境压力做好准备。然而，基因表达噪声在多细胞生物中的作用仍不清楚。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了新技术如何揭示出在遗传上完全相同的植物之间和内部基因表达的惊人可变性。我们描述了最近的进展，并推测转录噪声作为一种在植物中产生功能性表型多样性的机制的功能。
