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Frugal microbes reduce the cost of proteins

Bacteria tend to be more frugal when constructing proteins for use outside of the cell versus internally, saving their energy for synthesizing compounds that can be recycled, according to research published in the current issue of the online journal mBio?."Because extracellular proteins are lost to the environment and not recycled like other cellular proteins, they present a greater burden on the cell, as their amino acids cannot be reutilized during translation. We hypothesize that evolution has optimized extracellular proteins to reduce their synthetic burden on the cell," says Matthew Chapman of the University of Michigan, an author on the study.Microbes secrete proteins to perform essential interactions with their environment. Because microbes generally lack a system to import proteins, secretion is often a one-way street and the secreted proteins are less likely to be recycled by the organism due to environmental loss. It would therefore make sense that these secreted proteins would evolve to r

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