Towards the development of a minimal cell model by generalization of a model of Escherichia coli: Use of dimensionless rate parameters

Citation
St. Browning et Ml. Shuler, Towards the development of a minimal cell model by generalization of a model of Escherichia coli: Use of dimensionless rate parameters, BIOTECH BIO, 76(3), 2001, pp. 187-192
Citations number
21
Categorie Soggetti
Biotecnology & Applied Microbiology",Microbiology
Journal title
BIOTECHNOLOGY AND BIOENGINEERING
ISSN journal
00063592 → ACNP
Volume
76
Issue
3
Year of publication
2001
Pages
187 - 192
Database
ISI
SICI code
0006-3592(200111)76:3<187:TTDOAM>2.0.ZU;2-Q
Abstract
A model of a minimal cell would be a valuable tool in identifying the organ izing principles that relate the static sequence information of the genome to the dynamic functioning of the living cell. Our approach for developing a minimal cell model is to first generalize an existing model of Escherichi a coli by expressing reaction rates as ratios to a set of reference paramet ers. This generalized model is a prototype minimal cell model that will be developed by adding detail to explicitly include each chemical species. We tested the concept of a generalized model by testing the effect of scaling all enzyme-catalyzed reactions in the E. coli model. The scaling has little effect on cellular function for a wide range of kinetic ratios, where the kinetic ratio is defined as the rate of all enzyme-catalyzed reactions in a given model relative to those in the E. coli model. (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.