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Defining the Energetic Costs of Cellular Structures

All cellular structures are assembled from molecular building blocks, and molecular building blocks incur energetic costs to the cell. In an energy-limited environment, the energetic cost of a cellular structure imposes a fitness cost and impacts a cell’s evolutionary trajectory. While the importance of energetic considerations was realized for decades, the distinction between direct energetic costs expended by the cell and potential energy that the cell diverts into cellular biomass components, which we define as the opportunity cost, was not explicitly made, leading to large differences in values for energetic costs of molecular building blocks used in the literature. We describe a framework that defines and separates various components relevant for estimating the energetic costs of molecular building blocks and the resulting cellular structures. This distinction among energetic costs is an essential step towards discussing the conversion of an energetic cost to a corresponding fitness cost.