Universal Protein Fluctuations in Populations of Microorganisms

作者:Salman Hanna; Brenner Naama*; Tung Chih kuan; Elyahu Noa; Stolovicki Elad; Moore Lindsay; Libchaber Albert; Braun Erez
来源:Physical Review Letters, 2012, 108(23): 238105.
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.108.238105

摘要

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.

  • 出版日期2012-6-6