Modelling mRNA translation: from the individual transcript to the impact on cellular physiology

POSTPONED: NEW DATE TBA

One of the greatest challenges in biophysical models of translation is to identify coding sequence features that affect the rate of translation and therefore the overall protein production or the cellular growth rate.

I will first introduce a power series method to solve a translation model based on the inhomogeneous exclusion process, a unidimensional nonequilibrium traffic model. This allows us to unveil simple design principles of nucleotide sequences determining protein production rates starting from our analytical solutions and simulations. We applied our method to the S. cerevisiae transcript sequences and interpret the obtained results based on the evolutionary role of the codons’ choice for regulating translation rates and ribosome densities.

In the second part of the talk I will talk about bacterial growth laws, the quantitative relationships between cell physiology and cellular composition. In particular, I will explain how the translation process and protein degradation shape those relations.