TO AN engineer, biological systems can look horribly sloppy. But when it comes to gene activity, a little sloppiness can be the key to survival.
Gene expression is a surprisingly “noisy” or variable process: even in a group of seemingly identical cells, there is often huge variation in the activity of a given gene from cell to cell. In recent years, some theorists have used computational models to suggest that this noise helps organisms cope better with environmental stresses, but until now there has been little experimental evidence to back this up.
To fill that gap, researchers led by Jim…
