The common misuse of noise decomposition as applied to genetic systems

Generation of Bacterial Diversity by Segregation of DNA Strands

“…Phenotypic diversity is often attributed to stochasticity or noise at the level, for example, of the transcription of key genes during the life of the cell (Elowitz et al, 2002;Chen et al, 2020). However, noise alone may not suffice to generate reproducibly (1) at the level of the individual cell, a large set of constituents that act together in a phenotype that is coherent (i.e., appropriate, complementary and non-contradictory, as when there is generation of the degradosome, which contains both exoribonucleases and endo-ribonucleases) and (2) at the level of the population, a range of phenotypes that is coherent with the possible environments that may arise.…”