Countless studies have shown that the rate of cell growth correlates with many other phenotypes, including the amount of ribosomes being produced and cell size. These correlations, often called “growth laws”, are powerful because they mean you can predict some phenotypes from others. But we’ve shown that these laws can be broken. For example, ribosome levels do not track growth rate when growth rate is depressed by misfolded proteins. Our goal is to better understand when the growth laws predict phenotype and under what contexts these laws are broken. Some of our work in this area involves single-cell RNA sequencing to find conditions where ribosome levels do not scale with growth rates. Other work involves evolution experiments that select on both cell size and cell growth rate in an effort to tease apart these two linked traits. Will we be able to break the laws? We hope so!

Relevant Papers:
-Ribosome levels do not scale with growth when growth is slowed by misfolded proteins link