Undergraduate (MCB, Engineering Math)
Postbac Researcher
I originally started by looking for a link between the level of cooperativity of a protein, as assessed through protein-protein interaction data, and the variability of its expression. Our hypothesis was that proteins that are not needed all the time will have both variable expression and sigmoidal switch-like kinetics that depend on high cooperativity. This project went everywhere during the course of the 3 years I was part of the Masel Lab. Eventually, just as time was about to run out, it morphed into something even more exciting. We discovered that the previous observation that protein interaction degree negatively predicts gene expression noise (Lehner 2010) was actually due to protein stickiness and not functional interactions. Our original hypothesis did survive, but fell out of the spotlight. Self interaction does positively predict variable expression, but only when other factors, such as stickiness, are accounted for.
Publications:
- Brettner, L.M., Masel, J. (2012) Protein stickiness, rather than number of functional protein-protein interactions, predicts expression noise and plasticity in yeast, BMC Systems Biology, 6:128
