Back

Multimodal screen reveals noise regulatory proteins

Garcia-Blay, O.; Hu, X.; Wassermann, C. L.; van Bokhoven, T.; Struijs, F. M. B.; Hansen, M. M. K.

2024-07-21 systems biology
10.1101/2024.07.17.603871 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Gene-expression noise can influence cell-fate choices across pathology and physiology. However, a crucial question persists: do regulatory proteins or pathways exist that control noise independently of mean expression levels? Our integrative approach, combining single-cell RNA sequencing with proteomics and regulator enrichment analysis, reveals 32 putative noise regulators. SON, a nuclear speckle-associated protein, alters transcriptional noise without changing mean expression levels. Furthermore, SONs noise regulation can propagate to the protein level. Long-read and total RNA sequencing shows that SONs noise regulation does not significantly change isoform usage or splicing efficiency. Moreover, SON depletion reduces state-switching in pluripotent mouse embryonic stem cells and impacts their fate choice during differentiation. Collectively, we discover a class of proteins that regulates noise orthogonally to mean expression levels. This work serves as a proof-of-concept that can identify other functional noise-regulators throughout development and disease progression.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.