The minimum energy required to build a cell
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Understanding the energy requirements for cell synthesis accurately and comprehensively has been a longstanding challenge. We introduce a computational model that estimates the minimum energy necessary to build any cell from its constituent parts. This method combines omics and internal cell compositions from various sources to calculate the Gibbs Free Energy of biosynthesis independently of specific metabolic pathways. Our public tool, Synercell, can be used with other models for minumum species-specific energy estimations in any well-sequenced species. The energy for synthesising the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and lipid bilayer of four cell types: Escherichia coli , Saccharomyces cerevisiae , an average mammalian cell and JCVI-syn3A were estimated. Their modelled minimum synthesis energies at 298 K were $$9.54\times 10^{-11}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>9.54</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>11</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> J/cell, $$4.99\times 10^{-9}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>4.99</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>9</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> J/cell, $$3.71\times 10^{-7}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>3.71</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>7</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> J/cell and $$3.69\times 10^{-12}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>3.69</mml:mn> <mml:mo>×</mml:mo> <mml:msup> <mml:mn>10</mml:mn> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo>-</mml:mo> <mml:mn>12</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:msup> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> respectively. Gram-for-gram synthesis of lipid bilayers requires the most energy, followed by the proteome, genome, and transcriptome. The average per gram cost of biomass synthesis is in the 300s of J/g for all four cells. Implications for the generalisability of cell construction and applications to biogeosciences, cellular biology, biotechnology, and astrobiology are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".