A coarse-grained biophysical model of E. coli and its application to perturbation of the rRNA operon copy number.

ABSTRACT: We propose a biophysical model of Escherichia coli that predicts growth rate and an effective cellular composition from an effective, coarse-grained representation of its genome. We assume that E. coli is in a state of balanced exponential steady-state growth, growing in a temporally and spatially constant environment, rich in resources. We apply this model to a series of past measurements, where the growth rate and rRNA-to-protein ratio have been measured for seven E. coli strains with an rRNA operon copy number ranging from one to seven (the wild-type copy number). These experiments show that growth rate markedly decreases for strains with fewer than six copies. Using the model, we were able to reproduce these measurements. We show that the model that best fits these data suggests that t

SUBMITTER: Tadmor AD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2320978 | biostudies-literature | 2008 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature