Transcriptional noise adjusted for expression levels reveals genes with high transcriptional noise that are highly expressed, functionally related, and co-regulated in yeast.

Understanding the relationship between variability in single-cell and non-single-cell gene expression studies will aid in understanding the role of and mechanisms that lead to variability in biological systems. Studies on the variation of gene expression levels in yeast normally focus on single cells and use the coefficient of variance (CV) as a measure of noise. The CV is typically negatively correlated with gene expression levels, so most of the studies using yeast find that genes with high transcriptional noise are lowly expressed.