PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Cortijo, Sandra AU - Aydin, Zeynep AU - Ahnert, Sebastian AU - Locke, James TI - Widespread inter-individual gene expression variability in <em>Arabidopsis thaliana</em> AID - 10.1101/335380 DP - 2018 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 335380 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/19/335380.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/06/19/335380.full AB - A fundamental question in biology is how gene expression is regulated to give rise to a phenotype. However, transcriptional variability is rarely considered and could influence the relationship between genotype and phenotype. It is known in unicellular organisms that gene expression is often noisy rather than uniform and this has been proposed to be beneficial when environmental conditions are unpredictable. However, little is known about transcriptional variability in plants. Using transcriptomic approaches, we analysed gene expression variability between individual Arabidopsis thaliana plants growing in identical conditions over a 24 hour time-course. We identified hundreds of genes that exhibit high inter-individual variability and found that many are involved in environmental responses. We also identified factors that might facilitate gene expression variability, such as gene length, the number of transcription factors regulating the genes and the chromatin environment. These results shed new light on the impact of transcriptional variability in gene expression regulation in plants.