Disentangling protein metabolic costs in human cells and tissues.

ABSTRACT: While more data are becoming available on gene activity at different levels of biological organization, our understanding of the underlying biology remains incomplete. Here, we introduce a metabolic efficiency framework that considers highly expressed proteins (HEPs), their length, and biosynthetic costs in terms of the amino acids (AAs) they contain to address the observed balance of expression costs in cells, tissues, and cancer transformation. Notably, the combined set of HEPs in either cells or tissues shows an abundance of large and costly proteins, yet tissues compensate this with short HEPs comprised of economical AAs, indicating a stronger tendency toward mitigating costs. We additionally observe that short proteins are prevalent HEPs across individual cells and tissues, whereas lo

SUBMITTER: Chagoyen M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11759310 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature