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Published October 2009 | Published + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Invariant Distribution of Promoter Activities in Escherichia coli

Abstract

Cells need to allocate their limited resources to express a wide range of genes. To understand how Escherichia coli partitions its transcriptional resources between its different promoters, we employ a robotic assay using a comprehensive reporter strain library for E. coli to measure promoter activity on a genomic scale at high-temporal resolution and accuracy. This allows continuous tracking of promoter activity as cells change their growth rate from exponential to stationary phase in different media. We find a heavy-tailed distribution of promoter activities, with promoter activities spanning several orders of magnitude. While the shape of the distribution is almost completely independent of the growth conditions, the identity of the promoters expressed at different levels does depend on them. Translation machinery genes, however, keep the same relative expression levels in the distribution across conditions, and their fractional promoter activity tracks growth rate tightly. We present a simple optimization model for resource allocation which suggests that the observed invariant distributions might maximize growth rate. These invariant features of the distribution of promoter activities may suggest design constraints that shape the allocation of transcriptional resources.

Additional Information

© Zaslaver et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Received January 16, 2009; accepted September 23, 2009; published October 23, 2009. We thank Paul Sternberg for providing lab space and resources. We also thank Eran Segal, Naama Barkai and Arbel Tadmor for valuable comments. We thank the Kahn Family Foundation and the Israel Science Foundation for support. Alon Zaslaver is supported by the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) and the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Author Contributions: Conceived and designed the experiments: AZ UA SI. Performed the experiments: AZ SI. Analyzed the data: AZ SI. Contributed reagents/ materials/analysis tools: AZ SK AB AJ AM ED UA SI. Wrote the paper: AZ UA SI.

Attached Files

Published - Zaslaver2009p6498Plos_Comput_Biol.pdf

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Supplemental Material - journal.pcbi.1000545.s021.xls

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Supplemental Material - journal.pcbi.1000545.s023.xls

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