ArticleGenetics2008
The cost of expression of Escherichia coli lac operon proteins is in the process, not in the products.
Article in Genetics, 2008. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 127 papers.
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Who cites it
127 citing papers in PubMed, 229 citations in OpenAlex.
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- EhVps29 Has a Role in the Location of the Retromer Complex and the Function of Key Virulence Factors inMicroorganisms · 2026Article
- Rational engineering of combinatorial bacterial therapies for cancer.Genome biology · 2026Review
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- A mismatch between slow protein synthesis and fast environmental fluctuations determines tradeoffs in bacterial proteome allocation strategies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- How memory and adaptation cost shape cell phenotypic dynamics in response to fluctuating environments.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Pulsatile basal gene expression as a fitness determinant in bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Non-canonical start codons confer context-dependent advantages in carbohydrate utilization for commensal E. coli in the murine gut.Nature microbiology · 2024Article
- Measuring the burden of hundreds of BioBricks defines an evolutionary limit on constructability in synthetic biology.Nature communications · 2024Article
- How total mRNA influences cell growth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Proteolytic stability and aggregation in a key metabolic enzyme of bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Measuring the burden of hundreds of BioBricks defines an evolutionary limit on constructability in synthetic biology.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Mendelian inheritance revisited: dominance and recessiveness in medical genetics.Nature reviews. Genetics · 2023Review
- Three Novel Antisense Overlapping Genes in E. coli O157:H7 EDL933.Microbiology spectrum · 2023Article
- Bridging ribosomal synthesis to cell growth through the lens of kinetics.Biophysical journal · 2023Article
- Indirect optimization of staphylokinase expression level in dicistronic auto-inducible system.AMB Express · 2022Article
67 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Transcriptional regulatory networks allow bacteria to express proteins only when they are needed. Adaptive hypotheses explaining the evolution of regulatory networks assume that unneeded expression is costly and therefore decreases fitness, but the proximate cause of this cost is not clear. We show that the cost in fitness to Escherichia coli strains constitutively expressing the lactose operon when lactose is absent is associated with the process of making the lac gene products, i.e., associated with the acts of transcription and/or translation. These results reject the hypotheses that regulation exists to prevent the waste of amino acids in useless protein or the detrimental activity of unnecessary proteins. While the cost of the process of protein expression occurs in all of the environments that we tested, the expression of the lactose permease could be costly or beneficial, depending on the environment. Our results identify the basis of a single selective pressure likely acting across the entire E. coli transcriptome.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.