Human cells build their essential machinery using complex economic strategies like 'trading' and 'externalities' based on what we eat.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
Cost-saving, trading, and internalization of externality: three economic strategies underlying amino acid archetypes of human metabolic enzymes
bioRxiv · 10.64898/2026.03.25.714160
The Takeaway
In simple life forms, cells just use the cheapest possible ingredients to build proteins, but human cells act like a complex economy. They 'trade' for expensive components found in our diet and invest high-cost materials into specific structures, treating protein assembly like a multi-layered financial market.
From the abstract
Amino acid composition of proteome reflects principles of metabolic resource allocation. While amino acids with higher biosynthetic costs are used less frequently in unicellular organisms, whether this rule extends to complex multicellular life remains elusive. Here we show that amino acid composition of human metabolic enzymes does not follow a simple cost-minimizing mode but instead segregate into four distinct amino-acid composition modules each associated with specific metabolic functions, a