Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2020
Volume 65, Number 1
Monday–Friday, March 2–6, 2020; Denver, Colorado
Session S20: Single-Molecule Techniques and Enzymes
11:15 AM–1:51 PM,
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Room: 301
Sponsoring
Unit:
DBIO
Chair: Helmut Strey, Stony Brook University
Abstract: S20.00004 : Brownian motion alone may not be sufficient to supply ribosomes with tRNA during translation elongation
Presenter:
Akshay J Maheshwari
(Bioengineering, Stanford University)
Authors:
Akshay J Maheshwari
(Bioengineering, Stanford University)
Emma del Carmen Gonzalez Gonzalez
(Chemical Engineering, Stanford University)
Alp M Sunol
(Chemical Engineering, Stanford University)
Drew Endy
(Bioengineering, Stanford University)
Roseanna Zia
(Chemical Engineering, Stanford University)
We hypothesize that some of the functions that remain unknown pertain to the physics of how molecules organize to produce cellular functions. To test our hypothesis we introduce translation elongation in E. coli as a model system. Due to its central role in protein production, elongation is likely to have undergone tremendous selective pressure to operate at the limits of physics. We construct a colloidal model of elongation and demonstrate that variable local volume densities around ribosomes at different growth rates may lead to competing trade-offs in tRNA transport and reaction. We then use lower-bounding simulations to show that tRNA transport via Brownian motion alone may be insufficient to recover experimentally determined elongation rates. Overall, we predict that currently unknown mechanisms for speeding up tRNA transport or biasing its spatial organization are implicated in translation elongation.
1Maheshwari et al. Phys. Rev. Fluids (2019)
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