MODELING:
Estimating the amount of AiiA per cell:
AiiA is under the control of the lac promoter. The transcription and mRNA degradation rates help us estimate the amount of mRNA present on the cell.
“The half-life of protein A is assumed to be around 10 minutes which is similar to what is used in Elowitz’s repressilator model [1]. Furthermore, we assume that a more aggressive degradation tail can enable half-times on the order of two minutes for protein B.”
Modeling the Lux/AiiA Relaxation Oscillator by Christopher Batten
In the paper AiiA is called protein B. Therefore the degradation rate for AiiA with an aggressive degradation tail is 0.0058/s. This would give us a lower limit.
Transcription initiation rate, km
Malan et al. (1984) measured the transcription initiation rate at P1 and report the following value: km ≈ 0.18min-1
mRNA degradation rate, jM
Kennell and Riezman (1977), measured a lacZ mRNA half-life of 1.5 min: ξM = 0.46/min
lacZ mRNA translation initiation rate, кB
From Kennell and Riezman (1977), translation starts every 3.2 s at the lacZ mRNA. This leads to the following translation initiation rate: кB ≈ 18.8/min
Santillán M. and Mackey M. C. (2004). Influence of Catabolite Repression and Inducer Exclusion on the Bistable Behavior of the lac Operon. Biophys J 86:1282–1292
Simulating with simbiology, AiiA reaches stationary state at almost 3500 molecules per cell.