Cellular economy in fission yeast cells continuously cultured with limited nitrogen resources

In ribosome biogenesis, a large fraction of ribosomes is used for producing ribosomal proteins themselves. Here, we applied simulation and experimentation to determine what fraction of ribosomes should be allocated for the synthesis of ribosomal proteins to optimize cellular economy for growth. We define the “r-fraction” as the fraction of mRNA of the ribosomal protein genes out of the total mRNA, and we simulated the effect of the r-fraction on the number of ribosomes. We then empirically measured the amount of protein and RNA in fission yeast cells cultured with high and low nitrogen sources. In the cells cultured with a low nitrogen source, the r-fraction decreased from 0.46 to 0.42 with a 40% reduction of rRNA, but the reduction of the total protein was smaller at 30%. These results indicate that the r-fraction is internally controlled to optimize the efficiency of protein synthesis at a limited cellular cost.