Concept

Developmental noise

Summary

Developmental noise or stochastic noise is a concept within developmental biology in which the observable characteristics or traits (phenotype) varies between individuals even though both individuals share the same genetic code (genotypes) and the other environmental factors are completely the same. Factors that influence the effect include stochastic, or randomized, gene expression and other cellular noise. Although organisms within a species share very similar genes, similar environments and similar developmental history, each individual organism can develop differences due to noise in signaling and signal interpretation. This developmental noise may help individuals gain the ability to adapt to the environment and contribute to their unique patterns of development. Human fingerprints provide a well-known example; the fingerprints differ even between genetically identical human twins. Developmental noise may help individuals gain the ability to adapt to the environment. Biological systems display both variation and robustness. Natural variation within a population is in large part genetically determined, but variation due to noise may contribute to a rapid response by an individual to changes in the environment. This variation can have an evolutionary tuning effect that contributes to the optimal fitness of a population. In support of this idea, it has been shown that bacteria can switch stochastically into a "persistent" state which has slow growth coupled with an ability to survive antibiotic treatment. In another study, it has been shown that most of the noisy proteins were associated with the stress response. When proteins are expressed in small quantities, the expression of more noisy proteins will be more influenced by noises which come from the environmental context. Types of noises include extrinsic noise which is the variation in cell-to-cell expression level of protein, and intrinsic noise which is the variation of the inherent stochastic nature of protein expression.

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developmental_noise

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