NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Even clonal populations of cells can be heterogeneous relative to the central dogma of biology, with "noise" leading to variability in mRNA and protein copy numbers.

However, determining how many proteins are produced per mRNA in a given cell has long been a challenge. Now scientists at ETH Zurich, University of Bern, and the University of Chicago have developed a new method that uses digital PCR (dPCR) to quantify both mRNA and the DNA products of a proximity ligation assay (PLA) for proteins.