Nonlinear Fitness Landscape of a Molecular Pathway
نویسندگان
چکیده
Genes are regulated because their expression involves a fitness cost to the organism. The production of proteins by transcription and translation is a well-known cost factor, but the enzymatic activity of the proteins produced can also reduce fitness, depending on the internal state and the environment of the cell. Here, we map the fitness costs of a key metabolic network, the lactose utilization pathway in Escherichia coli. We measure the growth of several regulatory lac operon mutants in different environments inducing expression of the lac genes. We find a strikingly nonlinear fitness landscape, which depends on the production rate and on the activity rate of the lac proteins. A simple fitness model of the lac pathway, based on elementary biophysical processes, predicts the growth rate of all observed strains. The nonlinearity of fitness is explained by a feedback loop: production and activity of the lac proteins reduce growth, but growth also affects the density of these molecules. This nonlinearity has important consequences for molecular function and evolution. It generates a cliff in the fitness landscape, beyond which populations cannot maintain growth. In viable populations, there is an expression barrier of the lac genes, which cannot be exceeded in any stationary growth process. Furthermore, the nonlinearity determines how the fitness of operon mutants depends on the inducer environment. We argue that fitness nonlinearities, expression barriers, and gene-environment interactions are generic features of fitness landscapes for metabolic pathways, and we discuss their implications for the evolution of regulation.
منابع مشابه
Punctuated equilibrium and shock waves in molecular models of biological evolution.
We consider the dynamics in infinite population evolution models with a general symmetric fitness landscape. We find shock waves, i.e., discontinuous transitions in the mean fitness, in evolution dynamics even with smooth fitness landscapes, which means that the search for the optimal evolution trajectory is more complicated. These shock waves appear in the case of positive epistasis and can be...
متن کاملOn Simplified Global Nonlinear Function for Fitness Landscape: A Case Study of Inverse Protein Folding
The construction of fitness landscape has broad implication in understanding molecular evolution, cellular epigenetic state, and protein structures. We studied the problem of constructing fitness landscape of inverse protein folding or protein design, with the aim to generate amino acid sequences that would fold into an a priori determined structural fold which would enable engineering novel or...
متن کاملNanocurcumin-Mediated Down-Regulation of Telomerase Via Stimulating TGFβ1 Signaling Pathway in Hepatocellular Carcinoma Cells
Background: Curcumin, extracted from turmeric, represents enormous potential to serve as an anticancer agent. Telomerase is viewed as a prominent molecular target of curcumin, and transforming growth factor-β1 (TGFβ1) has proven to be a major inhibitory signaling pathway for telomerase activity. In the current study, we aimed to explore suppressive effects of nanocurcumin on telomeras...
متن کاملQuasispecies theory for horizontal gene transfer and recombination.
We introduce a generalization of the parallel, or Crow-Kimura, and Eigen models of molecular evolution to represent the exchange of genetic information between individuals in a population. We study the effect of different schemes of genetic recombination on the steady-state mean fitness and distribution of individuals in the population, through an analytic field theoretic mapping. We investigat...
متن کامل