It is estimated that the concentration of RNA polymerase in a live bacterial cell (volume = 1 x 10-15 liter) is around 20 nM and that it weighs roughly 450,000 g/mole. How many molecules of RNA polymerase would you expect a typical bacterial cell to contain?
It is experimentally determined that a newly isolated bacterium produces about 2200 proteins when grown on glucose and the average molecular weight of these proteins is 41,000 Da. If an average amino acid weighs 110 Da and it takes 3 bp to code for each amino acid, how many base pairs does it take to encode a protein of average molecular weight (i.e. what is the size of a typical gene in this organism)?