Fig. 1: Models and empirical laws for cellular resource availability.
a Instead of explicitly modeling the binding and unbinding of all competing substrates to the free resource (left), one can define the rate of a compound’s synthesis as a product of the total abundance of the resource R, which can be free (r) or bound to a substrate molecule (bi), and the effective rate constant \({k}_{i}^{{{{{{\rm{eff}}}}}}}\) (right). The effective rate constant depends on all competing species’ concentrations, affinities to the resource, and product synthesis rates9. b First (dashed line) and second (solid lines) bacterial growth laws relate growth rate to ribosome content in different conditions. Formulated by Scott et al.21, they postulate that the cell’s ribosome content increases linearly with the growth rate as the culture medium’s nutrient quality improves, but this relationship becomes inverse when translation is inhibited by an antibiotic.
