The cells of an organism are like twin chefs sharing a kitchen. They have the same cookbook (DNA), but when copying the recipe to a cheat sheet and assembling the dish, random errors occur. This unpredictability, entropy, means that in identical cells, protein levels are sometimes high, sometimes low. And this noise isn't always bad: for example, bacteria use this variation so that part of the colony survives an encounter with an antibiotic.
Previously, it was only possible to calculate errors at the cheat-sheet stage. Now, a method has been proposed that, like a prism in spectroscopy, breaks down the tangled process into simple steps and transfers ready-made solutions from the instructions to the protein. For the first time, this approach even accounts for 'bursty' production, when a whole batch of cheat sheets is created at once. And here's the twist: additional control levels in the cell don't always reduce noise — sometimes they just amplify it. Proteins, made of carbon and other atoms, are now also amenable to this analysis.
Bacteria use protein noise as a natural insurance policy: random differences let part of the colony survive an antibiotic attack.
In Nick Gorkavy's story 'Astrovityanka', characters learn to control gene noise to prolong life and treat diseases.