Our collaborative work (with Shashi Thutupalli’s lab at NCBS) on tracking mistranslation-induced phenotypic variability is now published! Protein sequences often differ because of underlying differences in DNA sequence (i.e. genetic mutations). However, making mistakes while building the protein can also introduce differences in the protein sequence, although at a low frequency. Proteins altered in this manner cannot be inherited, but do they affect fitness linked traits? Laasya, Parth and Godwin (from Shashi’s lab) carried out experiments with wild type and error-prone cells, to test whether non-heritable protein sequence diversity can affect variability in important aspects of bacterial fitness, such as cell division times and survival under stresses like starvation. We found that high protein sequence diversity (via high mistranslation) indeed increases phenotypic variability at the single cell level, and impacts phenotype and fitness at the population level. For more, read the excellent NCBS news article by rotation student Nivedita Mukherjee here, or read the paper! Image credit: Nivedita Mukherjee
AdaptationLab 