posted on 2023-11-01, 19:10authored byMichael
C. Lanz, Lucas Fuentes Valenzuela, Joshua E. Elias, Jan M. Skotheim
Accurate measurements of the molecular composition of
single cells
will be necessary for understanding the relationship between gene
expression and function in diverse cell types. One of the most important
phenotypes that differs between cells is their size, which was recently
shown to be an important determinant of proteome composition in populations
of similarly sized cells. We, therefore, sought to test if the effects
of the cell size on protein concentrations were also evident in single-cell
proteomics data. Using the relative concentrations of a set of reference
proteins to estimate a cell’s DNA-to-cell volume ratio, we
found that differences in the cell size explain a significant amount
of cell-to-cell variance in two published single-cell proteome data
sets.