Fig. 3

Estimates of cell-to-cell variability using sort-seq. a–d Sort-seq simulations using the same configurations as in Fig. 2 a–f. Bias and efficiency of a–b the simple CV and c–d the MLE CV were plotted as in Fig. 2. e–f The effect of the number of gates on CV estimates from the yeast promoter dataset [8]. The change between the CV estimate using data from combined gates and the full dataset is plotted for two combined gate configurations (the same as in Fig. 2 i–j) for variants with different levels of CV, as estimated from the original data. Lower panels indicate median absolute change. g–h Sort-seq estimates of mean and CV from simulations using g a single reporter (GFP) and h two reporters (GFP and a reference reporter RFP). Spearman’s correlation ρ=0.48 for GFP g, and ρ=0.89 for GFP/RFP h. Dashed lines indicate the relationship between input mean and CV in each system, and the solid line is the prescribed relationship between mean and the intrinsic component of cell-to-cell variability