Sink Metabolism: A Conceptual Framework for Analysis

The basic objective of this study was to build a model thatdescribes the physiology of sinks and the process of unloadingassimilates from the phloem. The metabolic steps necessary todescribe a typical sink were obtained from the literature. Severalmethods to describe mathematically these metabolic steps areavailable but they were either too cumbersome and slow or toosimple. This necessitated the development of a new method todescribe multiple enzyme systems. This paper describes the developmentof that method. The method involves a rather simple enzyme analysisof coupled biochemical processes common to most types of sinks.A conceptual framework is presented to provide a basis for furtherquantification of the metabolism of various types of sinks throughtheir development sequence. sink metabolism, model-enzyme kinetics, King-Altman analysis, phloem unloading