Colloidal Physics Modeling Reveals How Per-Ribosome Productivity Increases with Growth Rate in Escherichia coli.

ABSTRACT: Faster-growing cells must synthesize proteins more quickly. Increased ribosome abundance only partly accounts for increases in total protein synthesis rates. The productivity of individual ribosomes must increase too, almost doubling by an unknown mechanism. Prior models point to diffusive transport as a limiting factor but raise a paradox: faster-growing cells are more crowded, yet crowding slows diffusion. We suspected that physical crowding, transport, and stoichiometry, considered together, might reveal a more nuanced explanation. To investigate, we built a first-principles physics-based model of Escherichia coli cytoplasm in which Brownian motion and diffusion arise directly from physical interactions between individual molecules of finite size, density, and physiological abundance. U

SUBMITTER: Maheshwari AJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9973364 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature