Related papers: Information costs in the control of protein synthe…
In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…
Deprivation of essential nutrients can have stark consequences for many processes in a cell. We consider amino acid starvation, which can result in bottlenecks in mRNA translation when ribosomes stall due to lack of resources, i.e. tRNAs…
One of the greatest challenges in biophysical models of translation is to identify coding sequences features that affect the rate of translation and therefore the overall protein production in the cell. We propose an analytic method to…
The rate of mRNA translation depends on the initiation, elongation, and termination rates of ribosomes along the mRNA. These rates depend on many "local" factors like the abundance of free ribosomes and tRNA molecules in the vicinity of the…
Translation is a central biological process by which proteins are synthesized from genetic information contained within mRNAs. Here we study the kinetics of translation at molecular level through a stochastic simulation model. The model…
It often is emphasized that gene expression is noisy. A seemingly contradictory view is that control mechanisms have been optimized to squeeze as much information as possible out of a limited number of molecules. Here we revisit these…
Homeostasis of protein concentrations in cells is crucial for their proper functioning, and this requires concentrations (at their steady-state levels) to be stable to fluctuations. Since gene expression is regulated by proteins such as…
DNA synthesis is considered as one of the most expensive components in current DNA storage systems. In this paper, focusing on a common synthesis machine, which generates multiple DNA strands in parallel following a fixed supersequence,we…
Large scale surveys in mammalian tissue culture cells suggest that the protein expressed at the median abundance is present at 8,000 - 16,000 molecules per cell and that differences in mRNA expression between genes explain only 10-40% of…
Proteins are essential components of living systems, capable of performing a huge variety of tasks at the molecular level, such as recognition, signalling, copy, transport, ... The protein sequences realizing a given function may largely…
Changes in a cell's external or internal conditions are usually reflected in the concentrations of the relevant transcription factors. These proteins in turn modulate the expression levels of the genes under their control and sometimes need…
The genetic code underlying protein synthesis is a canonical example of a degenerate biological system. Degeneracies in physical and biological systems can be lifted by external perturbations thus allowing degenerate systems to exhibit a…
Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…
In $\textit{Escherichia coli}$ bacterium, the molecular compounds involved in protein synthesis, messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and ribosomes, show marked intracellular localization patterns. Yet a quantitative understanding of the physical…
Experiments in recent years have vividly demonstrated that gene expression can be highly stochastic. How protein concentration fluctuations affect the growth rate of a population of cells, is, however, a wide open question. We present a…
How robust is the natural genetic code with respect to mistranslation errors? It has long been known that the genetic code is very efficient in limiting the effect of point mutation. A misread codon will commonly code either for the same…
According to the `ceRNA hypothesis', microRNAs (miRNAs) may act as mediators of an effective positive interaction between long coding or non-coding RNA molecules, carrying significant potential implications for a variety of biological…
Messenger RNA encodes a sequence of amino acids by using codons. For most amino acids there are multiple synonymous codons that can encode the amino acid. The translation speed can vary from one codon to another, thus there is room for…
Many {\it ribosomes} simultaneously move on the same messenger RNA (mRNA), each synthesizing separately a copy of the same protein. In contrast to the earlier models, here {\it we develop a ``unified'' theoretical model} that not only…
The twenty protein coding amino acids are found in proteomes with different relative abundances. The most abundant amino acid, leucine, is nearly an order of magnitude more prevalent than the least abundant amino acid, cysteine. Amino acid…