🦠Cell Economics
A runnable adaptation of Economic Principles in Cell Biology by the Economic Cell Collective, licensed CC BY 4.0 (Zenodo). This adaptation is CC BY-SA 4.0.
A cell spends a finite protein budget on catabolism, anabolism, and growth. Read it as an economy: allocation, cost, and trade-off, made runnable.
| Chapter | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | The economy of the cell | The cell as a metabolic system that spends resources to rebuild itself. The allocation trade-off, made runnable. | 🦠|
| 2. | An inventory of the cell | The proteome-dominated budget in numbers, and the ribosomes it takes to rebuild it each generation. | 🦠|
| 3. | Cell metabolism | Two laws per reaction: thermodynamics sets the direction, Michaelis-Menten kinetics sets the speed. | 🦠|
| 4. | Metabolic flux distributions | Steady state as Nv = 0, and the flux cone of everything the network could run. | 🦠|
| 5. | Optimization of metabolic fluxes | Flux balance analysis as a linear program, solved in-browser. One bound flips the strategy. | 🦠|
| 6. | The enzyme cost of a flux | Flux has a price in protein. Why the highest-yield pathway is often the wrong one. | 🦠|
| 7. | Principles of cell growth | Ribosomes make ribosomes. The growth laws as what optimal allocation looks like plotted. | 🦠|
| 8. | Microeconomics of cell metabolism | The cell as a consumer: overflow metabolism, Giffen goods, and diminishing returns. | 🦠|
The runnable models here are deliberately small: two or three reactions, solved in the browser. For genome-scale models use COBRApy; for the full treatment, read the source book.
Neighbors
- 💎 Auction Theory — allocation of a scarce resource under constraints, the same optimization move
- 🎲 Game Theory — strategies and trade-offs between competing agents
- 🎛 Control Theory — feedback and steady states in dynamic systems