The minimum energy required to build a cell.

Area of Science:

• Cellular Biology
• Biophysics
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Accurately quantifying cellular energy requirements for biosynthesis is a significant scientific challenge.
• Existing methods often rely on specific metabolic pathways, limiting their generalizability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a computational model estimating the minimum energy required for cell synthesis from constituent parts.
• To provide a tool (Synercell) for calculating Gibbs Free Energy of biosynthesis independent of metabolic pathways.

Main Methods:

• Combined omics data and internal cell compositions from diverse sources.
• Calculated Gibbs Free Energy of biosynthesis for genome, transcriptome, proteome, and lipid bilayer.
• Applied the model to Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, mammalian cells, and JCVI-syn3A.

Main Results:

• Estimated minimum synthesis energies for four cell types at 298 K.
• Determined that lipid bilayer synthesis requires the most energy per gram, followed by proteome, genome, and transcriptome.
• Found the average per gram cost of biomass synthesis to be consistently in the 300s J/g across the studied cells.

Conclusions:

• The Synercell model offers a pathway-independent method for estimating cellular synthesis energy.
• Findings have broad implications for cell construction, biotechnology, astrobiology, and biogeosciences.
• Lipid bilayers represent a major energetic cost in cell synthesis.