Gene regulation in Escherichia coli is commonly selected for both high plasticity and low noise

Bacteria often respond to dynamically changing environments by regulating gene expression. Despite this regulation being critically important for growth and survival, little is known about how selection shapes gene regulation in natural populations. To better understand the role natural selection plays in shaping bacterial gene regulation, here we compare differences in the regulatory behaviour of naturally segregating promoter variants from Escherichia coli (which have been subject to natural selection) to randomly mutated promoter variants (which have never been exposed to natural selection). We quantify gene expression phenotypes (expression level, plasticity and noise) for hundreds of promoter variants across multiple environments and show that segregating promoter variants are enriched for mutations with minimal effects on expression level. In many promoters, we infer that there is strong selection to maintain high levels of plasticity, and direct selection to decrease or increase cell-to-cell variability in expression. Taken together, these results expand our knowledge of how gene regulation is affected by natural selection and highlight the power of comparing naturally segregating polymorphisms to de novo random mutations to quantify the action of selection.