Towards the development of a minimal cell model by generalization of a model of Escherichia coli: use of dimensionless rate parameters. |
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Authors: | S T Browning M L Shuler |
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Institution: | School of Chemical Engineering, 120 Olin Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-5201, USA. |
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Abstract: | A model of a minimal cell would be a valuable tool in identifying the organizing 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 Escherichia coli by expressing reaction rates as ratios to a set of reference parameters. 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. |
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Keywords: | minimal cell cell model kinetic scaling cell composition |
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