title: Preview. A penetrating look at stochasticity in development.
abstract: In recent work published in Nature, Raj et al. (2010) use single mRNA molecule quantification to show that variation in gene expression in Caenorhabditis elegans increases in mutants displaying incomplete penetrance. They find that a bimodal response is triggered when noisy expression of an upstream regulator crosses a critical threshold.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biology, New York University, 1009 Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY 10003, USA.
authors.forename: Robert J
authors.initials: RJ
authors.lastname: Johnston
authors.forename: Claude
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Desplan