Accounting for experimental noise reveals that mRNA levels, amplified by post-transcriptional processes, largely determine steady-state protein levels in yeast.

Cells respond to their environment by modulating protein levels through mRNA transcription and post-transcriptional control. Modest observed correlations between global steady-state mRNA and protein measurements have been interpreted as evidence that mRNA levels determine roughly 40% of the variation in protein levels, indicating dominant post-transcriptional effects. However, the techniques underlying these conclusions, such as correlation and regression, yield biased results when data are noisy, missing systematically, and collinear---properties of mRNA and protein measurements---which motivated us to revisit this subject. Noise-robust analyses of 24 studies of budding yeast reveal that mRNA levels explain more than 85% of the variation in steady-state protein levels. Protein levels are not proportional to mRNA levels, but rise much more rapidly. Regulation of translation suffices to explain this nonlinear effect, revealing post-transcriptional amplification of, rather than competition with, transcriptional signals. These results substantially revise widely credited models of protein-level regulation, and introduce multiple noise-aware approaches essential for proper analysis of many biological phenomena.

Cross-Plane Seebeck Coefficient Measurement of Misfit Layered Compounds (SnSe)n(TiSe2)n (n = 1,3,4,5).

We report cross-plane thermoelectric measurements of misfit layered compounds (SnSe)n(TiSe2)n (n = 1,3,4,5), approximately 50 nm thick. Metal resistance thermometers are fabricated on the top and bottom of the (SnSe)n(TiSe2)n material to measure the temperature difference and heat transport through the material directly. By varying the number of layers in a supercell, n, we vary the interface density while maintaining a constant global stoichiometry. The Seebeck coefficient measured across the (SnSe)n(TiSe2)n samples was found to depend strongly on the number of layers in the supercell (n). When n decreases from 5 to 1, the cross-plane Seebeck coefficient decreases from -31 to -2.5 µV/K, while the cross-plane effective thermal conductivity decreases by a factor of 2, due to increased interfacial phonon scattering. The cross-plane Seebeck coefficients of the (SnSe)n(TiSe2)n are very different from the in-plane Seebeck coefficients, which are higher in magnitude and less sensitive to the number of layers in a supercell, n. We believe this difference is due to the different carrier types in the n-SnSe and p-TiSe2 layers and the effect of tunneling on the cross-plane transport.