Fundamental behaviors emerge from simulations of a living minimal cell.

Cell

Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; NSF Center for the Physics of Living Cells, Urbana, IL 61801, USA; NIH Center for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics, Urbana, IL 61801, USA. Electronic address:

Published: January 2022

AI Article Synopsis

  • The study presents a comprehensive kinetic model of JCVI-syn3A, a minimal cell with only 493 genes, focusing on its dynamic behaviors and cellular processes.
  • Cryo-electron tomography is used to understand the cell's structure and ribosome placement, aiding in simulations that reveal the balance of metabolism, genetics, and growth during the cell cycle.
  • The findings highlight the energy costs of various processes, demonstrate how imbalances affect transcription and translation rates, and integrate experimental data for a deeper understanding of mRNA stability and DNA replication.

Article Abstract

We present a whole-cell fully dynamical kinetic model (WCM) of JCVI-syn3A, a minimal cell with a reduced genome of 493 genes that has retained few regulatory proteins or small RNAs. Cryo-electron tomograms provide the cell geometry and ribosome distributions. Time-dependent behaviors of concentrations and reaction fluxes from stochastic-deterministic simulations over a cell cycle reveal how the cell balances demands of its metabolism, genetic information processes, and growth, and offer insight into the principles of life for this minimal cell. The energy economy of each process including active transport of amino acids, nucleosides, and ions is analyzed. WCM reveals how emergent imbalances lead to slowdowns in the rates of transcription and translation. Integration of experimental data is critical in building a kinetic model from which emerges a genome-wide distribution of mRNA half-lives, multiple DNA replication events that can be compared to qPCR results, and the experimentally observed doubling behavior.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9985924PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2021.12.025DOI Listing

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