Chance at the heart of the cell
Résumé
During the last 20 years we have witnessed an important discovery in molecular biology as it was demonstrated that gene expression is a stochastic process. This discovery was made possible by the availability of techniques based on cellular imaging of fluorescent reporter proteins allowing the analysis of gene expression in single cells in real time. It was thus shown that isogenic cells submitted to the same environment always display random fluctuations in gene expression.