Mechanistic links between cellular trade-offs, gene expression, and growth.

ABSTRACT: Intracellular processes rarely work in isolation but continually interact with the rest of the cell. In microbes, for example, we now know that gene expression across the whole genome typically changes with growth rate. The mechanisms driving such global regulation, however, are not well understood. Here we consider three trade-offs that, because of limitations in levels of cellular energy, free ribosomes, and proteins, are faced by all living cells and we construct a mechanistic model that comprises these trade-offs. Our model couples gene expression with growth rate and growth rate with a growing population of cells. We show that the model recovers Monod's law for the growth of microbes and two other empirical relationships connecting growth rate to the mass fraction of ribosomes. Furthe

SUBMITTER: Weiße AY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4352769 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature