Benefits of an erratic boss : Gene expression noise facilitates the evolution of gene regulatory interactions
Event details
| Date | 30.04.2014 |
| Hour | 11:00 › 12:00 |
| Speaker |
Dr. Erik van Nimwegen |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
In studies of gene regulation, it is often tacitly assumed that the interactions between transcriptional regulators and their target promoters are finely tuned to ensure condition-appropriate gene expression levels of the targets. However, how natural selection might evolve such finely tuned regulation from an initial state without regulation, is rarely discussed. Similarly, whereas many recent studies have shown that gene expression is noisy and that some genes exhibit much higher expression noise than others, it is poorly understood how natural selection has acted on expression noise. I will present a combination of experimental evidence (based on comparison of native and synthetically evolved E. coli promoters) and theoretical modeling, arguing that the evolution of gene expression noise is intimately coupled to the evolution of gene regulatory interactions.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Organizer
- School of Life Sciences - Laboratory of Systems Biology and Genetics