Data for: Engineering tRNA abundances for synthetic cellular systems

Data for publication: Engineering tRNA abundances for synthetic cellular systems

Abstract

Routinizing the engineering of synthetic cells requires specifying determining beforehand how many of each molecule are needed. First-principles tools for specifying molecular abundances enabling whole-cell synthetic biology are missing. We use a colloidal dynamics simulator to make predictions for how tRNA abundances impact protein synthesis rates. We use rational design and direct RNA synthesis to make 21 synthetic tRNA surrogates from scratch. We use evolutionary algorithms within a computer aided design framework to design engineer translation systems predicted to work faster or slower depending on tRNA abundance differences. We build and test the so-specified synthetic systems and find that qualitative agreement between expected and observed systems performance matchqualitatively match.  First-principles modeling combined with bottom-up experiments can help molecular-to-cellular scale synthetic biology realize “design, build, work” frameworks that transcend tinker-and-test.

Data description

The data here consists of (1) All Colloidal Smoldyn & CD-CAD simulation input parameter and output files & (2) experimental data used for the associated publication. Simulation data was produced using Colloidal Dynamics modeling and Colloidal Dyamics-CAD (CD-CAD) as described in the associated manuscript. Data folders should be used directly with modeling and analysis code provided on Github: https://github.com/EndyLab/tRNACAD.