title: Dynamics of protein distributions in cell populations.
abstract: A population of cells exhibits wide phenotypic variation even if it is genetically homogeneous. In particular, individual cells differ from one another in the amount of protein they express under a given regulatory system under fixed conditions. Here we study how protein distributions in a population of the yeast S. cerevisiae are shaped by a balance of processes: protein production--an intracellular process--and protein dilution due to cell division--a population process. We measure protein distributions by employing reporter green fluorescence protein (gfp) under the regulation of the yeast GAL system under conditions where it is metabolically essential. Cell populations are grown in chemostats, thus allowing control of the environment and stable measurements of distribution dynamics over many generations. Despite the essential functional role of the GAL system in a pure galactose medium, steady-state distributions are found to be universally broad, with exponential tails and a large standard-deviation-to-mean ratio. Under several different perturbations the dynamics of the distribution is observed to be asymmetric, with a much longer time to build a wide expression distribution from below compared with a fast relaxation of the distribution toward steady state from above. These results show that the main features of the protein distributions are largely determined by population effects and are less sensitive to the intracellular biochemical noise.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa 32000, Israel.
authors.forename: Naama
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Brenner
authors.forename: Keren
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Farkash
authors.forename: Erez
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Braun
mesh_terms: D000199:Actins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D002455:Cell Division; D003470:Culture Media; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; D005434:Flow Cytometry; D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins / Q000235:genetics; D009010:Monte Carlo Method; D014176:Protein Biosynthesis; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000737:chemistry / Q000166:cytology* / Q000254:growth & development / Q000378:metabolism*; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D015534:Trans-Activators / Q000235:genetics; D014157:Transcription Factors / Q000378:metabolism
chemical_list: C465210:Act1 protein, S cerevisiae; D000199:Actins; D003470:Culture Media; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; C518355:GAL10 protein, S cerevisiae; C052130:GAL4 protein, S cerevisiae; D029701:Saccharomyces cerevisiae Proteins; D015534:Trans-Activators; D014157:Transcription Factors; D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins