Building resilience by cultivating difference: A role for noise in development

Across all biological life, cells in the same environment, with exposure to the same signals and cues exhibit differences in gene expression patterns. This phenomenon is deemed noise and it has long been a question whether it serves a functional role. In plants, recent advances indicate that noise enables many cell fate decisions and thus triggers organogenesis. Additionally, evidence suggests that noise allows organisms to adapt to dynamic environmental conditions and stressors. Given these recent findings and the increasing pressures of climate change on agriculture, efforts to understand the sources and effects of noise are crucial for future projects in engineering resilient, adaptable crops. In this review, we discuss how plants manage noisy gene expression, in some cases buffering and in some cases amplifying natural transcriptional noise. We also discuss the downstream implications of cell to cell heterogeneity on developmental outcomes and robustness. We describe recent progress in this area and present the possibility of using gene expression variability as an engineering target.