On the evolution of gene expression noise

SémIDEEV
 19/12/2024
 10:00:00
 Julien Dutheil, Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön, Germany
 IDEEV - Salle Rosalind Franklin

The biological functions of an organism are the result of chemical reactions occurring within each cell. These reactions are the product of interactions between molecules, typically in tiny numbers, and therefore, subject to the randomness of diffusion and binding. These reactions are catalysed by macromolecules whose structure is encoded in the genome. Of all biological functions, there is one to rule them all: the process by which these macromolecules are synthesised from the genetic information in the genome. This process is termed gene expression and is, therefore, a stochastic process. As a result, two isogenic cells in the same environment will differ in the expression level of their genes; this cell-to-cell variation is termed expression noise. Using evolutionary models of gene regulatory networks and high throughput single-cell transcriptome data, we investigate which selective forces shaped the evolution of gene expression noise and its contribution to the evolution of complex systems (WIP!).