What is it about?
Understanding the noisy nature of regulatory processes governing adaptation in biological systems requires performing single cell measurements to incorporate the knowledge of variability between single cells as well as in the same cell over time. By tracking families of single yeast cells, we have shown that cells preserve memory of their mothers' dynamic stress response in stressful environment.
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Why is it important?
While the extent of the cellular response can vary within cell populations, if and how the variations at the single cell level could be influenced by familial relationships, in a stress dependent manner, are not well understood. By developing experimental platforms and computational methodologies, we probed signal processing strategies implemented by a live single cell to adapt in adverse environment. This study provides insight into which scheme evolution might have acted on to optimize fitness in stressful environments. Our approach is generic and applicable to other tractable organisms for studying their noisy time-dynamic network activity .
Perspectives
The interdisciplinary nature of this work is an example of how systems levels experimental design can come together with computational and analytical methods to bridge the gap in our understanding of cellular variations in stressful environments. Investigation of such cellular heterogeneity can be important in understanding the sensitivity of cells to certain drug types.
Dr Meenakshi Chatterjee
Janssen Research & Development
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Heritable stress response dynamics revealed by single-cell genealogy, Science Advances, April 2018, American Association for the Advancement of Science,
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1701775.
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