Gene Expression Noise Facilitates Adaptation and Drug Resistance Independently of Mutation

Abstract

We show that the effect of stress on the reproductive fitness of noisy cell populations can be modelled as first-passage time problem, and demonstrate that even relatively short-lived fluctuations in gene expression can ensure long-term survival of a drug-resistant population. We examine how this effect contributes to the development of drug-resistant cancer cells, and demonstrate that permanent immunity can arise independently of mutations.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Colored extrinsic fluctuations and stochastic gene expression
• Intrinsic noise in stochastic models of gene expression with molecular memory and bursting
• Post-transcriptional regulation of noise in protein distributions during gene expression
• An Algorithm for the Stochastic Simulation of Gene Expression and Heterogeneous Population Dynamics

Cited by in corpus (11)

• Role of relaxation time scale in noisy signal transduction
• Noise robustness and metabolic load determine the principles of central dogma regulation
• Advancing Drug Resistance Research Through Quantitative Modeling and Synthetic Biology
• Gaussian Memory in Kinematic Matrix Theory for Self-Propellers
• Suppression and enhancement of transcriptional noise by DNA looping
• Does Non-Genetic Heterogeneity Facilitate the Development of Genetic Drug Resistance?
• Robustness against additional noise in cellular information transmission
• Toward understanding of the role of reversibility of phenotypic switching in the evolution of resistance to therapy
• Evolutionary adaptation is facilitated by the presence of lethal genotypes
• Analyzing the effect of cell rearrangement on Delta-Notch pattern formation
• Concentration of Empirical First-Passage Times