Bulletin of the American Physical Society
APS March Meeting 2022
Volume 67, Number 3
Monday–Friday, March 14–18, 2022; Chicago
Session N14: Delbruck Prize SymposiumInvited Live Streamed Prize/Award
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Sponsoring Units: DBIO Chair: Margaret Cheung, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Room: McCormick Place W-183B |
Wednesday, March 16, 2022 11:30AM - 12:06PM |
N14.00001: Delbruck Prize (2022): Resource Allocation for Bacteria Growth: Laws and Mechanisms Invited Speaker: Terence T Hwa Extensive quantitative experiments in the past decade have established simple empirical laws of resource allocation obeyed by exponentially growing bacteria subjected to different environmental and genetic perturbations [1-4]. Combinations of these laws, together with their kinetic extensions, have led to quantitative account of a number of long-standing phenomena in microbiology, including catabolite repression [2], diauxic shift [5], overflow metabolism [6], as well as novel phenomena involving innate response to antibiotics [7], growth-lag tradeoff [8], and just-in-time enzyme recovery kinetics [9]. In this talk, I will briefly recount how we embarked on the path of top-down phenomenological studies, exhibit the striking universality of the law of ribosome allocation across diverse bacterial lineages, and describe a recent study establishing how this law is implemented molecularly via simple regulatory processes [10, 11]. The findings provide a rare view of “dimensional reduction” by a living cell, i.e., how a cell manages to collapse the complex, high-dimensional dynamics of metabolic reactions underlying cell growth to quantitatively “perceive” the growth rate, and allocate resources in accordance to the growth rate. Overall, these studies showcase how the basic methodology of classical physics can be used to discover simple organizing principles of living systems and construct quantitative, predictive theories linking molecules to cellular behaviors. . |
Wednesday, March 16, 2022 12:06PM - 12:42PM |
N14.00002: Optimality and Microbial Growth Strategies Invited Speaker: Bas Teusink For unicellular organisms the average specific growth rate, i.e. the rate of biomass production per amount of catalyst – the biomass itself- is a direct measure of fitness. Hence, many approaches exist in microbial physiology and metabolic engineering that use growth rate optimisation as an organisational principle to predict growth strategies from mechanistic models and biological (omics) data. We proposed, much at the same time as Terry Hwa did when he introduced proteome reallocation, that protein costs must be weighted against the functional benefits of specific growth strategies. In this talk I will discuss to what extent the premise of optimality in resource allocation may hold, and provide experimental evidence for its relevance. I will discuss the mathematical properties of the constrained optimisation problem that corresponding computational models try to solve, and will illustrate their use (and limitations). I hope to convince that, although not everything is optimal in biology, evolutionary optimisation provides a powerful force through which biological systems have been shaped, and thus a useful perspective to understand biological designs. |
Wednesday, March 16, 2022 12:42PM - 1:18PM |
N14.00003: Precision in protein production: requirements and mechanism Invited Speaker: Gene-Wei Li Cells possess specific compositions of proteins that define their physiology. I will discuss our research that is focused on elucidating the physiological requirements and mechanistic basis of the precise rates of protein production. Using bacterial model systems, we develop quantitative approaches to measure, manipulate, and model how co-transcribed genes produce distinct proportions of proteins, as well as how imbalanced production affects cell fitness. Our ultimate goal is to establish predictive frameworks to derive quantitative protein expression levels and their effects on bacterial growth physiology from operon sequences. |
Wednesday, March 16, 2022 1:18PM - 1:54PM |
N14.00004: Esther Hoffman Beller Lectureship (2022): Growth-rate dependent action of cell-wall targeting antibiotics Invited Speaker: Rosalind J Allen Antibiotics cure infections by killing bacteria or preventing them from growing – yet much remains to be understood about how this works. Many of the most widely used antibiotics target bacterial cell wall synthesis. These antibiotics often kill bacteria by causing them to explode, or lyse. We have investigated experimentally the efficacy of the cell wall targeting antibiotic mecillinam, which is used to treat urinary tract infections, for bacteria growing under different conditions. We show that a simple physiological model that takes into account the growth of bacterial cell volume and surface area, can explain non-trivial experimental observations. |
Wednesday, March 16, 2022 1:54PM - 2:30PM |
N14.00005: TBA Invited Speaker: Boris I Shraiman
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