Stochastic activation of a DNA damage response causes cell-to-cell mutation rate variation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cells rely on the precise action of proteins that detect and repair DNA damage. However, gene expression noise causes fluctuations in protein abundances that may compromise repair. For the Ada protein in Escherichia coli, which induces its own expression upon repairing DNA alkylation damage, we found that undamaged cells on average produce one Ada molecule per generation. Because production is stochastic, many cells have no Ada molecules and cannot induce the damage response until the first expression event occurs, which sometimes delays the response for generations. This creates a subpopulation of cells with increased mutation rates. Nongenetic variation in protein abundances thus leads to genetic heterogeneity in the population. Our results further suggest that cells balance reliable repair against toxic side effects of abundant DNA repair proteins.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it