Quantcast

Noisy inner life of cells

Within the smoothly operating factory that is the cell, tiny molecular machines carry out their tasks with order and certainty. Or at least that’s what many scientists once believed. In a recent issue of Science, researchers report the first demonstration that bacterial cells intrinsically possess a significant degree of randomness or “noise.” More precisely, they show that key “gene-reading” machines may operate unpredictably, resulting in randomly fluctuating amounts of individual proteins.