Guiseppe Facchetti: "Transients in metabolic adaptation by Flux Balance Analysis"

Guiseppe Facchetti
SISSA International School of Advanced Studies Trieste, Italy

Transients in metabolic adaptation by Flux Balance Analysis

In recent years, genome-scale metabolic networks have represented an important paradigm of Systems Biology, well describing how interesting biological features can be deduced in spite of the complexity of the model. In parallel, the development of quantitative and simple computational frameworks such as Flux Balance Analysis has increased both their characterization and spectrum of applications. While most of these works concern “static” results, less attention has been given to dynamical phenomena such as, for instance, the adjustment of the metabolism to a perturbation. It is known that the drop of the growth rate induced by a change of the carbon source in the growing medium is only transient. I will show a possible interpretation of this experimental evidence in terms of a stochastic sequence of short-terms metabolic adjustments. The heuristic describing this behavior is being developed and characterized, showing promising preliminary results.