William Jeremy Blake

TL;DR: Stochasticity in gene expression can provide the flexibility needed by cells to adapt to fluctuating environments or respond to sudden stresses, and a mechanism by which population heterogeneity can be established during cellular differentiation and development.

TL;DR: It is shown that stochasticity (noise) arising from transcription contributes significantly to the level of heterogeneity within a eukaryotic clonal population, in contrast to observations in prokaryotes, and that such noise can be modulated at the translational level.

TL;DR: It is shown that increased variability in gene expression, affected by the sequence of the TATA box, can be beneficial after an acute change in environmental conditions.

TL;DR: This work describes a synthetic yeast genome project, Sc2.0, and the first partially synthetic eukaryotic chromosomes, Saccharomyces cerevisiae chromosome synIXR, and semi-synVIL, and shows the utility of SCRaMbLE as a novel method of combinatorial mutagenesis, capable of generating complex genotypes and a broad variety of phenotypes.

TL;DR: How networks with increased complexity are being constructed from simple modular components and how quantitative deterministic and stochastic modeling of these modules may provide the foundation for accurate in silico representations of gene regulatory network function in vivo are discussed.