Understanding the evolution of cellular features requires a catalog of costs of building, maintaining, and operating cell parts. Lane and Martin (1) define the cost of a gene as the ratio of a cell’s metabolic rate and total gene number. This is an ecologically and evolutionarily meaningless definition, revealing nothing about the incorporation of biomass into offspring and failing to account for differences in generation lengths among organisms. We directly derive the DNA-, mRNA-, and protein-level costs of a gene, dividing these by a cell’s lifetime energy expenditure and accounting for cell division time (2). Despite Lane and Martin’s (3) claim that their paper was not about the bioenergetic costs of a gene, they stated, “By ‘energy per gene’, we mean the cost of expressing the gene” (1).
Discussion(0)
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.