ERC Advanced Grant · 2016
Noise and robustness in the evolution of novel protein phenotypes
Living cells are constantly barraged by perturbations that originate within themselves. Especially abundant – far more than DNA mutations – are two kinds of such perturbations. The first is gene expression noise, pervasive stochastic variation of transcript and protein levels. The second is mistranslation noise, the misincorporation of amino acids by ribosomes during protein synthesis. Organisms and protein molecules can evolve robustness – the persistence of well-adapted phenotypes – to both kinds of noise. Theory predicts that noise and robustness can affect the adaptive evolution of new proteins, but we do not know whether they help or hinder adaptive evolution. We hypothesize that noise…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.