ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Molecular crowding limits translation and cell growth.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 169 papers.
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169 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bridging energy and proteome allocation models allows prediction of the resource cost of traits across environments.PLoS biology · 2026Article
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- The proportional scaling of mRNA and ribosome concentrations controls eukaryotic cell growth.Nature cell biology · 2026Article
- EnzymeTuning improves enzyme-constrained metabolic modeling and proteome abundance prediction through deep learning.Nature communications · 2026Article
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- Inertial sensing of water content in tumor spheroids.Science advances · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A proteome optimal allocation model for elucidating effects of temperature on bacterial growth.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- The selfish ribosome.ArXiv · 2026Article
- Constant trouble with prolines-navigating a global translation dilemma.Nucleic acids research · 2026Review
- Protein codes and mobility together shape cellular function and disease.Trends in biochemical sciences · 2026Review
- Dynamic Constrained Allocation Flux Balance Analysis (dCAFBA).Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.) · 2026Article
- Decreased cytoplasmic crowding via inhibition of ribosome biogenesis can trigger Candida albicans filamentous growth.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Substrate Exclusion Greenlights Physical Autocatalysis of Enzyme Activity in Membraneless Proto-Organelles.Biomacromolecules · 2025Article
- Essentialome-Wide Multigenerational Imaging Reveals Mechanistic Origins of Cell Growth Laws.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Cells prioritize the regulation of cell mass density.Science advances · 2025Article
- Systematic modulation of bacterial resource allocation by perturbing RNA polymerase availability via synthetic transcriptional switches.Nucleic acids research · 2025Article
109 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Bacterial growth is crucially dependent on protein synthesis and thus on the cellular abundance of ribosomes and related proteins. Here, we show that the slow diffusion of the bulky tRNA complexes in the crowded cytoplasm imposes a physical limit on the speed of translation, which ultimately limits the rate of cell growth. To study the required allocation of ancillary translational proteins to alleviate the effect of molecular crowding, we develop a model for cell growth based on a coarse-grained partitioning of the proteome. We find that coregulation of ribosome- and tRNA-affiliated proteins is consistent with measured growth-rate dependencies and results in near-optimal allocation over a broad range of growth rates. The analysis further resolves a long-standing controversy in bacterial growth physiology concerning the growth-rate dependence of translation speed and serves as a caution against premature identification of phenomenological parameters with mechanistic processes.
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