This, in turn, offers an unexpected glimpse of randomness and variability in gene expression.
“This significant amount of flexibility and randomness in gene expression is important for adaptation as a species evolves, but it is unclear how it functions in organisms today,” said professor David Spector at New York-based Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).
Occasionally, a cell will arbitrarily begin to use of one copy of a gene over the other.
The activation of only one member of a gene pair is called 'monoallelic gene expression'.
To better understand when 'monoallelic gene expression' is established, Spector and his team collaborated with researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.
