title: Towards the development of a minimal cell model by generalization of a model of Escherichia coli: use of dimensionless rate parameters.
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.
authors.affiliation: School of Chemical Engineering, 120 Olin Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-5201, USA.
authors.forename: S T
authors.initials: ST
authors.lastname: Browning
authors.forename: M L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Shuler
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D004926:Escherichia coli / Q000254:growth & development / Q000502:physiology*; D005947:Glucose / Q000378:metabolism; D007700:Kinetics; D008954:Models, Biological
chemical_list: D005947:Glucose