Proteins are essential players of life activities. Intracellular protein levels directly affect cellular functions and cell fate. Upon cell division, the proteins in the mother cell are inherited by the daughters. However, what factors and by how much they affect this epigenetic inheritance of protein abundance remains unclear. Using both computational and experimental approaches, we systematically investigated this problem. We derived an analytical expression for the dependence of protein inheritance on various factors and showed that it agreed with numerical simulations of protein production and experimental results. Our work provides a framework for quantitative studies of protein inheritance and for the potential application of protein memory manipulation.

蛋白质是生命活动必不可少的参与者。细胞内蛋白质水平直接影响细胞功能和细胞命运。细胞分裂后，母细胞中的蛋白质由女儿遗传。然而，哪些因素以及它们影响这种蛋白质丰度的表观遗传的程度尚不清楚。使用计算和实验方法，我们系统地研究了这个问题。我们导出了蛋白质遗传对各种因素的依赖性的分析表达式，并表明它与蛋白质生产的数值模拟和实验结果一致。我们的工作为蛋白质遗传的定量研究和蛋白质记忆操作的潜在应用提供了一个框架。