ICM Seminar: Protein overabundance is driven by growth robustness, with Professor Paul Wiggins
- Date: 5 December 2024, 15:15
- Type: Seminar
- Organiser: Johan Elf Lab
On Thursday, the 5th of December at 15:15 in Trippelrummet, SciLifeLab, the Johan Elf Lab welcomes you all to join the fourth seminar in the ICM seminar series, Horizons in Cell and Molecular Biology, with professor Paul Wiggins from University of Washington as the guest speaker.
About Professor Paul Wiggins
Prof. Wiggins studies quantitative and physical biology in bacterial model organisms. The long-term goal of his research is to discover emergent properties and principles that describe the function of living systems.
Recent work includes protein overabundance, central dogma optimization, metabolic homeostasis, and measurements of in vivo replication fork velocity.
The lab exploits a range of experimental and theoretical approaches from single-molecule imaging to high-throughput genetic and modeling approaches. They also develop novel tools for quantitative biology, including tools for cell segmentation using machine learning algorithms.
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Abstract
Protein expression levels optimize cell fitness: Too low an expression level of essential proteins will slow growth by compromising essential processes; whereas overexpression slows growth by increasing the metabolic load. This trade-off naively predicts that cells maximize their fitness by sufficiency, expressing just enough of each essential protein for function.
We test this prediction in the naturally-competent bacterium Acinetobacter baylyi by characterizing the proliferation dynamics of essential-gene knockouts at a single-cell scale (by imaging) as well as at a genome-wide scale (by TFNseq). In these experiments, cells proliferate for multiple generations as target protein levels are depleted by dilution from wild-type expression levels.
This approach facilitates a proteome-scale analysis of protein overabundance. As predicted by the Robustness-Load Trade-Off (RLTO) model, we find that roughly 70% of essential proteins are overabundant and that overabundance increases as the expression level decreases, the signature prediction of the model.
These results reveal that robustness plays a fundamental role in determining the expression levels of essential genes and that overabundance is a key mechanism for ensuring robust growth.
Wiggins' Lab
Visit Paul Wiggins' lab here (link to external page).
Contact
If you wish to meet the speaker, please email: irmeli.barkefors@icm.uu.se
For other enquiries, please email: Hanna Turesson or Madeleine Crawford