Quality control by a mobile molecular workshop: quality versus quantity

TL;DR

This paper models ribosome efficiency by analyzing the trade-offs between translational fidelity and speed, showing that high productivity does not necessarily compromise quality, and explores the effects of quality control mechanisms.

Contribution

It provides an analytical framework for evaluating ribosome performance focusing on fidelity and speed, and discusses the impact of quality control on mechano-chemical coupling.

Findings

High protein synthesis rates do not require sacrificing fidelity.

Quality control mechanisms influence mechano-chemical coupling strength.

Analytical measures of efficiency for ribosome function are developed.

Abstract

Ribosome is a molecular machine that moves on a mRNA track while, simultaneously, polymerizing a protein using the mRNA also as the corresponding template. We define, and analytically calculate, two different measures of the efficiency of this machine. However, we arugue that its performance is evaluated better in terms of the translational fidelity and the speed with which it polymerizes a protein. We define both these quantities and calculate these analytically. Fidelity is a measure of the quality of the products while the total quantity of products synthesized in a given interval depends on the speed of polymerization. We show that for synthesizing a large quantity of proteins, it is not necessary to sacrifice the quality. We also explore the effects of the quality control mechanism on the strength of mechano-chemical coupling. We suggest experiments for testing some of the ideas presented here.