Analysis of stochasticity of gene expression in single cells of Mycoplasma gallisepticum

Abstract

Genetically identical organisms under the same conditions usually have differences in the level of expression of the same genes. This phenomenon is called genetic noise, and it is characteristic of all organisms. In this paper, we studied the stochasticity of gene expression in Mycoplasma gallisepticum at the level of single cells using fluorescence microscopy. The results show that M. gallisepticum demonstrates high level of variations in gene expression: even in case of strong promoters and ribosome-binding sites, some cells demonstrate negligible expression level. Such a high stochasticity in gene expression may have significant impact on the life of this reduced bacterium.

The Dynamics of Mycoplasma gallisepticum Nucleoid Structure at the Exponential and Stationary Growth Phases

“…This observation corroborates the hypothesis that ribosomes form a different compartment that may, to some extent, maintain homeostasis independently of the chromosome and transcription machinery. To test this hypothesis, we assembled a set of reporter constructs in which the mMaple2 coding sequence ( Rumyantseva et al, 2019 ) was transcribed from a strong or weak promoter and featured different types of Shine-Dalgarno (SD) sequences: strong consensus (AGGAGG), weak (AAGGAA) and none (AAAAA). The translational determinants of the 5’-ends of M. gallisepticum mRNAs have been previously reported in Mazin et al (2014) and Fisunov et al (2017) .…”

“…For quantitative gene expression measurements, the previously designed transposon vector based on pBluescript SK + backbone ( Mazin et al, 2014 ) was modified to carry the gene for mMaple2 reporter protein ( Rumyantseva et al, 2019 ). The assembly of genetic constructs was performed in E. coli Top-10 strain.…”