Universal protein fluctuations in populations of microorganisms
Biological Physics
2012-05-01 v2 Soft Condensed Matter
Statistical Mechanics
Molecular Networks
Abstract
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.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1204.5591,
title = {Universal protein fluctuations in populations of microorganisms},
author = {Hanna Salman and Naama Brenner and Chih-kuan Tung and Noa Elyahu and Elad Stolovicki and Lindsay Moore and Albert Libchaber and Erez Braun},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1204.5591},
year = {2012}
}