Protein synthesis molecule by molecule 英文参考文献.docVIP

Minireview Protein synthesis molecule by molecule Ido Golding and Edward C Cox Address: Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Correspondence: Ido Golding. Email: igolding@. Edward C Cox. Email: ecox@ Published: 20 June 2006 Genome Biology 2006, 7:221 (doi:10.1186/gb-2006-7-6-221) The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at /2006/7/6/221 ? 2006 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Since the earliest days of molecular biology it has been known that even a seemingly uniform culture of bacteria is made up of cells very different from each other in terms of their levels of a given protein. This individuality has now finally been quantified at single-molecule resolution, as reported in two recent papers. In 1953 Seymour Benzer asked the following question [1]: when we induce?-galactosidase in a culture of Escherichia coli, do all the cells make the enzyme, or is there consider- able heterogeneity in the population? He could not measure the amount of enzyme in each cell directly, so he infected cultures with a phage whose replication depended on ?-galactosidase activity. The production of new phage can be detected on a cell-by-cell basis and became the measure of ?-galactosidase concentration in each cell. Benzer found that there was considerable individuality in an induced popula- tion, although how much he could not say, nor could he identify its origins. This classic experiment has served to keep the question of cell individuality alive [2,3] and is often quoted, but only recently have the tools become available to study transcription and translation in single living cells. colleagues and, in a recent paper in Science [11], they provide some beautiful results bearing on the kinetics of single-molecule synthesis in growing E. coli cells. Detecting single protein molecules First,