It started with a theoretical problem. I’m not sure if you’ve ever given much thought to whether the binding of bacterial transcription factors is optimized for binding DNA strongly, but to make a long story short, because it’s kind of beside the point, it is not. But if it’s not binding strength, it must be optimized for something else because that’s what evolution does to biological processes. This was several years ago. At the time, people were starting to do single-molecule experiments in living cells and as a consequence, realized that biology is a stochastic mess and that it’s a wonder that cells can regulate anything at all. In light of this, noise suppression seems to be a pretty reasonable thing to optimize for, especially if you are an auto-regulatory transcription factor…

Read the rest of the story in Nature’s behind the paper