Living with noise : The evolution of gene expression noise in gene regulatory networks

One of the keystones of evolutionary biology is the study of how organismal traits change in time. Technological advancements in the past twenty years have enabled us to study the variation of an important trait, gene expression level, at single cell resolution. One of the sources of gene expression level variation is gene expression noise, a result of the innate stochasticity of the gene expression process. Gene expression noise is gene-specific and can be tuned by selection, but what drives the evolution of gene-specific expression noise remains an open question.

In this thesis, I explore the selective pressure and evolvability of gene-specific expression noise in gene regulatory networks. I use evolutionary simulations by applying rounds of mutation, recombination and reproduction to populations of model gene regulatory networks in different selection scenarios. 

In the first chapter, I investigate the response of gene-specific expression noise in gene regulatory networks in constant environments, which imposes stabilizing selection on gene expression level. The probability of responding to selection and the strength of the selective response was affected by local network centrality metrics. Furthermore, global network features, such as network diameter, centralization and average degree affected the average expression variance and average selective pressure acting on constituent genes. 

In the second chapter, I investigate the response of mean gene expression level and gene-specific expression noise in isolated genes and genes in gene regulatory networks in changing environments. Gene-specific expression noise of genes increased under fluctuating selection, indicating the evolution of a bet-hedging strategy. Under directional selection gene-specific expression noise transiently increased, showing that expression noise plays a role in the adaptation process towards a new mean expression optimum.

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