Living systems are intrinsically noisy.
Surprisingly, the functioning of a living organism is not significantly hindered by these random fluctuations. Biological cells can even exploit noise to deliberately introduce diversity into a population or utilize the fluctuations to propel themselves. In these cases noise is not a nuisance, but essential for survival. The general interest of the van Oudenaarden lab is to quantitatively understand, and if possible, to control noise in biological systems. These single molecule experiments unravel the biophysics and biochemistry of matter normally obscured by the ensemble average of bulk measurements.