Noise in gene expression as the source of non-genetic individuality in the chemotactic response of Escherichia coli

A deterministic computer model of the signal transduction pathway mediating bacterial chemotaxis was used to examine the variation in both unstimulated swimming behaviour and adaptation time to stimuli in clonal populations of cells. Copy numbers of proteins in the pathway were computed from a simplified model of transcription and translation that predicts greater-than-Poissonian statistics. Simulated and experimental individuality data could be brought into good agreement on varying the noise strength of the protein copy number distributions. In the simulations, all the proteins in the pathway are involved to a significant degree in the appearance of phenotypic diversity, although there is a modest decrease in influence with increasing copy number. (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of the Federation of European Biochemical Societies.