Gene expression in individual cells can be surprisingly noisy. In unicellular organisms this noise can be functional; for example, by allowing a subfraction of the population to prepare for environmental stress. The role of gene expression noise in multicellular organisms has, however, remained unclear. In this review, we discuss how new techniques are revealing an unexpected level of variability in gene expression between and within genetically identical plants. We describe recent progress as well as speculate on the function of transcriptional noise as a mechanism for generating functional phenotypic diversity in plants.

中文翻译：

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基因表达噪声是否在植物中发挥作用？

单个细胞中的基因表达可能令人吃惊。在单细胞生物中，这种噪声可能起作用。例如，通过允许一部分人口为环境压力做准备。然而，基因表达噪声在多细胞生物中的作用仍不清楚。在这篇综述中，我们讨论了新技术如何揭示出基因相同的植物之间和之内的基因表达的意外水平的变化。我们描述了最新的进展，并推测了转录噪声的功能，作为在植物中产生功能性表型多样性的机制。