Universal protein fluctuations in populations of microorganisms

The copy number of any protein fluctuates among cells in a population; characterizing and understanding these fluctuations is a fundamental problem in biophysics. We show here that protein distributions measured under a broad range of biological realizations collapse to a single non-gaussian curve u...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2012-06, Vol.108 (23), p.238105-238105, Article 238105
Main Authors: Salman, Hanna, Brenner, Naama, Tung, Chih-kuan, Elyahu, Noa, Stolovicki, Elad, Moore, Lindsay, Libchaber, Albert, Braun, Erez
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Escherichia coli - chemistry
Escherichia coli - metabolism
Escherichia coli Proteins - chemistry
Escherichia coli Proteins - metabolism
Models, Biological
Saccharomyces cerevisiae - chemistry
Saccharomyces cerevisiae - metabolism
Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins - chemistry
Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins - metabolism
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The copy number of any protein fluctuates among cells in a population; characterizing and understanding these fluctuations is a fundamental problem in biophysics. We show here that protein distributions measured under a broad range of biological realizations collapse to a single non-gaussian curve under scaling by the first two moments. Moreover, in all experiments the variance is found to depend quadratically on the mean, showing that a single degree of freedom determines the entire distribution. Our results imply that protein fluctuations do not reflect any specific molecular or cellular mechanism, and suggest that some buffering process masks these details and induces universality.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/physrevlett.108.238105