Abstract 

At the beginning of this century, with the technical advances in the field of molecular biology, interesting biological phenomena can be studied with the resolution of single cell. The fluctuation of gene expression is one of the important topics with intensive attention. We will introduce some works studying the noise of gene expression. First of all is the work of Elowitz et al [1]. In Escherichia coli, they show that the probabilistic nature of the chemical reactions is the intrinsic source of gene expression noise. On the other hand, the extrinsic noise is caused by the fluctuation of cellular components. Paulsson [2] proposed an equation for describing different sources of noises and their effect on the downstream gene. The work of Pedraza and van Oudenaarden [3] demonstrated the noise propagation in a genetic network, experimentally. To accurately describe the noise of downstream genes, the transmitted noise affected by the regulation from the upstream gene and the global noise are also important. These works established the fundamentals of understanding and manipulating noise propagation in genetic regulation networks.

References:

[1] Elowitz, M. B.; Levine, A. J.; Siggia, E. D.; Swain, P. S. Science 2002, 297, 1183.

[2] Paulsson, J. Nature 2004, 427, 415.

[3] Pedraza, J. M.; van Oudenaarden, A. Science 2005, 307, 1965.

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