Modeling Cell Size Distribution with Heterogeneous Flux Balance Analysis
- Author(s)
- Michiel Busschaert, Florence H. Vermeire, Steffen Waldherr
- Abstract
For over two decades, Flux Balance Analysis (FBA) has been successfully used for predicting growth rates and intracellular reaction rates in microbiological metabolism. An aspect that is often omitted from this analysis, is segregation or heterogeneity between different cells. In this letter, we propose an extended FBA method to model cell size distributions in balanced growth conditions. Hereto, a mathematical description of the concept of balanced growth in terms of cell mass distribution is presented. The cell mass distribution, quantified by the Number Density Function (NDF), is affected by cell growth and cell division. An optimization program is formulated in a general manner in which the NDF, average cell culture growth rate and reaction rates per cell mass are treated as optimization variables. As qualitative proof of concept, the methodology is illustrated on a core carbon model of Escherichia coli under aerobic growth conditions. This illustrates feasibility and applications of this method, while indicating some shortcomings intrinsic to the simplified biomass structuring and the time invariant approach.
- Organisation(s)
- Functional and Evolutionary Ecology
- External organisation(s)
- Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
- Journal
- IEEE Control Systems Letters
- Volume
- 7
- Pages
- 1903-1908
- No. of pages
- 6
- ISSN
- 2475-1456
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1109/LCSYS.2023.3282699
- Publication date
- 06-2023
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 106045 Theoretical biology, 106044 Systems biology
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Control and Optimization, Control and Systems Engineering
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/modeling-cell-size-distribution-with-heterogeneous-flux-balance-analysis(11eff2c7-8850-4d00-a0ae-305dcda8083d).html