Growth costs of protein allocation in models of growing cells

Suboptimal protein allocation in microbial models predicts growth costs consistent with bacterial experimental patterns, highlighting the importance of resource trade-offs.

• Why it matters: Understanding how protein expression deviations affect growth is crucial for optimizing microbial productivity and fitness, yet modeling these costs is complex due to multiple interacting mechanisms.
• What they did: Using growth balance analysis (GBA), a nonlinear modeling framework, the study predicts steady-state growth and biomass composition, including enzyme saturation reactant concentrations, for microbial systems with proteins fixed at suboptimal levels.
• The result: The models reveal relationships between protein allocation and growth rate that align with experimental observations, providing a practical approach for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology to predict growth costs.