Kinetic modelling of Escherichia coli's electron transport chain coupled to a simplified growth model

SysMO is a European transnational funding and research initiative on "Systems Biology of Microorganisms".

The goal pursued by SysMO was to record and describe the dynamic molecular processes going on in unicellular microorganisms in a comprehensive way and to present these processes in the form of computerized mathematical models.

Systems biology will raise biomedical and biotechnological research to a new quality level and contribute markedly to progress in understanding. Pooling European research ...

"Systems Understanding of Microbial Oxygen responses" (SUMO) investigates how Escherichia coli senses oxygen, or the associated changes in oxidation/reduction balance, via the Fnr and ArcA proteins, how these systems interact with other regulatory systems, and how the redox response of an E. coli population is generated from the responses of single cells. There are five sub-projects to determine system properties and behaviour and three sub-projects to employ different and complementary modelling ...

Changing the oxygen availability leads to an adaptation of Escherichia coli at different biological levels. After pertubation of oxygen in chemostat experiments the microorganism(s) will come back to another steady state. This investigation deals with these stationary responses of Escherichia coli within the aerobiosis scale. The change for different biological variables, in different areas of the organism like the electron transport chain, the TCA cycle or globally is investigated by wildtype ...

Goals:

1. Understanding the regulatory principles of Escherichia coli’s electron transport chain (ETC) for varying oxygen conditions in glucose-limited continuous cultures (especially regulatory loops via the transcription factors FNR and ArcA).
2. Explaining the observed phenomena in the measurement data.
3. Predicting unmeasured variables especially of the gene expression regulatory loops.

Means:

1. Experiments (chemostat experiments within the aerobiosis scale).
2. Kinetic modelling (especially ...

The model describes the electron transport chain (ETC) of Escherichia coli by ordinary differential equations. Also a simplified growth model based on an abstract reducing potential describing the balance of electron donor (glucose) and electron acceptors is coupled to the ETC. The model should reproduce and predict the regulation of the described system for different oxygen availability within the aerobiosis scale (glucose limited continuous culture<=>chemostat). Therefore oxygen is changed ...