How Yeast Cells Use Information to Grow
Author Information
Author(s): Andreas Wagner
Primary Institution: University of Zurich
Hypothesis
The accuracy with which a yeast cell can sense nutrient availability relates to its fitness and growth rate.
Conclusion
Cells need to sense nutrients with high accuracy to ensure optimal growth, but such accuracies may not be achievable in practice.
Supporting Evidence
- Cells need to estimate nutrient concentrations to very high accuracy (greater than 22 bits) for optimal growth.
- Natural selection can resolve fitness differences of genetic variants smaller than 10-6.
- Even small sensing errors can lead to significant growth-rate differences that matter to natural selection.
Takeaway
Yeast cells need to know exactly how much food is around to grow well, but they might not be able to figure it out accurately enough.
Methodology
The study used metabolic flux balance analysis to explore the relationship between nutrient information and biomass production in yeast.
Limitations
The study assumes that nutrient sensing errors lead to underestimation of nutrient availability, which may not always be the case.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
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