MicroRNAs buffering of transcriptional noise (360G-Wellcome-203808_Z_16_A)

MicroRNAs are short non conding RNAs found in all animals and involved in most biological processes where they normally function as translation repressors. Virtually every mRNA is targeted by several microRNAs and individual microRNAa are predicted to target hundreds of different mRNAs. As modulators of translation they are often found to be components of complex regulatory gene networks, however a single microRNA generally has a relatively small impact on the network overall. Mutating a single microRNA does not normally have a large phenotypic effect on an organism. This observation has led to a hypothesis that microRNAs may act primarily by buffering the effect of transcriptional noise or environmental variability on transcription to normalize protein levels. In this work we aim to establish a system to allow the study of microRNA buffering through quantitative simultaneous imaging of a microRNA target and its protein product.