Tomorrow @ *11:30* am

[Leenoy Meshulam]

Good morning,

Tomorrow we will hear from Georg Rieckh from the Kryazhimskiy in UCSD about “Noise in gene expression allows for the rapid adaptation of regulatory sequences”. See abstract below.

We aim to start on time so that we can finish by 12:30 and accommodate everybody’s schedules.

Mamoun’s for lunch. Room 200 as usual.

 

Leenoy

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Title:
Noise in gene expression allows for the rapid adaptation of regulatory sequences

Abstract:
Much of phenotypic diversity originates from variation in regulatory, rather than coding, sequence. While genome studies provide evidence for rapid evolution in regulatory sequences, theoretical studies suggest that such dynamics could be slow. To address this discrepancy, we study a biophysically realistic model of promoter evolution, where a regulatory sequence evolves to yield higher expression. Importantly, we include the effects of gene expression noise, whose magnitude is also encoded in the evolving genotype. We show that even in the absence of any direct selection on noise, evolution can favor high-noise genotypes; as a result, high final fitness is reached quickly, even in a high-dimensional genotype space. Compared to evolution without noise, this offers orders-of-magnitude speed-up in evolutionary dynamics. We argue that knowledge of gene expression noise for a large part of genotype space is necessary to understand evolutionary trajectories of regulatory sequences.