Seminars

In biological system, order is built from disorderly behaving components. For example, it is well established that the expression of genes is noisy, which contributes to building a less noisy structure such as a cell. This fact has been observed and known for many years and has become a major intuition of biologists. However, a unifying theory to explain how order is established from noisy components has been a decades-long question in biological science. As a step toward to building such a theory, we have applied a stochastic theory to provide a formal mathematical proof to this long-standing biologists' intuition. Our results here provide a quantitative proof that order could be built from noisy regulatory components. Furthermore, our findings indicate that many, if not all, biological processes, even those that appear to be governed by deterministic mechanisms, could be explained by a stochastic theory. In conclusion, we propose that re-evaluating all biological processes based on such stochastic theory may lead to inventing a new biological law.