Biological time control in the face of cytoplasmic noise:

Most biological timing phenomena (developmental temporal programs, cell cycle, circadian clock etc.) appear robust despite numerous potential sources of biological noise that exist in the cellular environment. Mechanisms that provide robustness, however, are heavily understudied. Similarly, both the type and degree of biological noise involved in shaping these mechanisms are largely unknown. We study these questions, taking the timing of mitotic entry in syncytial fly embryos as our paradigm. Because the syncytial divisions of thousands of nuclei occur strikingly synchronously (especially in the face of drastic flows and diffusion barriers), these orchestrated divisions and their local errors provide a tremendous avenue to investigate both the types of noise present in the cytoplasm and the cellular mechanisms evolved to cope with them to sustain robust biological timing.