ArticleNature communications2017
Optimality and sub-optimality in a bacterial growth law.
Article in Nature communications, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 74 papers.
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Who cites it
74 citing papers in PubMed.
- Fluctuating environmental adaptation shapes antibiotic survival in Mycobacterium tuberculosis.Journal of microbiology (Seoul, Korea) · 2026Article
- Enzyme kinetics shapes the growth response of metabolic networks.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Gene loss and compensatory evolution as a source of metabolic preadaptations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Dietary restriction shapes intergenerational ribosome abundance and early growth of Caenorhabditis elegans offspring.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- A proteome optimal allocation model for elucidating effects of temperature on bacterial growth.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2026Article
- Data-driven analysis reveals distinct genomic and environmental contributions to bacterial growth curves.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Reinforcement learning for adaptive control of phenotypically heterogeneous bacterial populations.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Overflow metabolism in bacterial, yeast, and mammalian cells: different names, same game.Molecular systems biology · 2025Review
- Synthetic protein degradation circuits using programmable cleavage and ligation by Sortase A.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A mismatch between slow protein synthesis and fast environmental fluctuations determines tradeoffs in bacterial proteome allocation strategies.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Population Dynamics of Escherichia coli Growing under Chemically Defined Media.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Article
- Growth rate controls the sensitivity of gene regulatory circuits.Science advances · 2025Article
- Cytoplasmic MgProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Incoherent feedback from coupled amino acids and ribosome pools generates damped oscillations in growing E. coli.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Physics of swimming and its fitness cost determine strategies of bacterial investment in flagellar motility.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Biosensor characterization: formal methods from the perspective of proteome fractions.Synthetic biology (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Single-cell heterogeneity in ribosome content and the consequences for the growth laws.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- How DoesACS synthetic biology · 2024Article
- How total mRNA influences cell growth.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
14 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Organisms adjust their gene expression to improve fitness in diverse environments. But finding the optimal expression in each environment presents a challenge. We ask how good cells are at finding such optima by studying the control of carbon catabolism genes in Escherichia coli. Bacteria show a growth law: growth rate on different carbon sources declines linearly with the steady-state expression of carbon catabolic genes. We experimentally modulate gene expression to ask if this growth law always maximizes growth rate, as has been suggested by theory. We find that the growth law is optimal in many conditions, including a range of perturbations to lactose uptake, but provides sub-optimal growth on several other carbon sources. Combining theory and experiment, we genetically re-engineer E. coli to make sub-optimal conditions into optimal ones and vice versa. We conclude that the carbon growth law is not always optimal, but represents a practical heuristic that often works but sometimes fails.
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