  We investigate the protein expression pattern of the lamB gene in Escherichia
coli LE392. The gene product LamB is an important membrane protein for maltose
transport into cells but it is also exploited by bacteriophage lambda for
infection. Although our bacterial population is clonal, stochastic gene
expression leads to a majority population with a large receptor number and a
minority population with a small receptor number. We find that the LamB
receptor distribution p(n) of the small-n population is scale invariant with
the exponent depending on growth conditions. A heuristic model is proposed that
relates the observed exponent to the protein production rate.
