Modelling Microbial Cells as Stochastic Enzyme Cascades


Dibyendu Dutta, IIT Bombay

  Microbial cells are able to synthesize the many metabolites they need for survival, like amino acids, nucleobases, and vitamins, from the simple sugars they uptake from the environment, by using a large number of enzyme- catalyzed metabolic pathways. The environmental context determines the demand for each metabolite, and cells are unable to divide without meeting these. Thus, we hypothesize that cellular growth dynamics should depend majorly upon the dynamics of its enzyme cascades and model microbial cells as enzyme cascades trying to meet its production goals, and then divide. We use the framework to obtain statistical properties of internal and external cellular parameters that experiments may not be able to reveal. Here, we have made an assumption about non-limiting ribosomes, which we aim to relax as we move forward, to be consistent with the existing ideas about bacterial growth laws.