An integrated metabolism, growth and cycle model for Saccharomyces cerevisiae: Validation against chemostat data

The usefulness of a mathematical model addressing complex biological functions is given by its ability to provide quantitative agreement with a variety of experimental parameters and data, often dispersed in the literature, so to clearly define the underlying design principles governing the non-linear dynamics of the functions under investigation [1]. In this paper we formulate an integrated model providing a coarse grain representation of the main functions (metabolism, growth and cell cycle) of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae growing in a chemostat culture, suitably tuning the model parameters in order to reproduce available experimental data on metabolism, growth and cycle of S. cerevisiae cells growing in chemostat. The Metabolism, Growth and Cycle Model (MGCM) arises from the integration of two sub-modules: the Metabolism and Growth Model (MGM) and the Growth and Cycle Model (GCM). We exploited the MGM as a parameter generator for some of the GCM parameters: the idea is that different environments stimulate different metabolisms, thus providing different growth conditions that, in turns, provide different cycle domains. A different set of experimental data is also exploited to verify the goodness of the model predictions.  [1] Gatenby R. (2012) Nature, 491, S55