What all the noise is about: the physical basis of cellular individuality.

Noise has been traditionally viewed as undesirable in biology, resulting in disorder, distortion, and disruption, and ultimately as something that needs to be filtered and removed. More recently, it has been shown that noise can also be beneficial. We briefly review historical developments pertaining to noise in biological physics, and some of the current research in the field of molecular and cellular biophysics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]