Prof. dr. Bas Teusink, VU Systems Bioinformatics group – 13 November 2018

Metabolic regulation from the optimality perspective

ABSTRACT

Cells have the amazing capability to adapt to ever-changing environmental conditions. In recent years the paradigm of limited-resource allocation has matured as a conceptual framework in which coordinated changes in the proteome can be explained. In short, it assumes a fixed (limited) proteome within which the cell needs to operate, and thus e.g. an investment in stress resistance will come at the cost of investments in growth. This framework has explained trade-offs between growth rate and stress resistance or biomass yield, and growth-rate associated behaviours such as overflow metabolism, catabolite repression and ribosome biosynthesis. There is, however, still a debate whether such behaviour is necessarily optimal behaviour in an evolutionary sense. Furthermore, there are different modeling approaches to cellular resource allocation, from kinetic toy models, to genome-scale stoichiometric models, to phenomenological growth law models. In this talk I will provide an overview of the models and will provide a coherent overarching picture that shows that growth-rate maximisation under protein constraints can be used to reconcile many of the observations. Moreover, I will discuss mechanisms by which such optimisations can be achieved by biochemical networks.

Nature of Life seminars

Date       :   13 November 2018

Time       :   15.45 hours

Location:   Room WN-F647, W&N building VU Amsterdam