title: Scaling and optimal synergy: Two principles determining microbial growth in complex media.
abstract: High-throughput experimental techniques and bioinformatics tools make it possible to obtain reconstructions of the metabolism of microbial species. Combined with mathematical frameworks such as flux balance analysis, which assumes that nutrients are used so as to maximize growth, these reconstructions enable us to predict microbial growth. Although such predictions are generally accurate, these approaches do not give insights on how different nutrients are used to produce growth, and thus are difficult to generalize to new media or to different organisms. Here, we propose a systems-level phenomenological model of metabolism inspired by the virial expansion. Our model predicts biomass production given the nutrient uptakes and a reduced set of parameters, which can be easily determined experimentally. To validate our model, we test it against in silico simulations and experimental measurements of growth, and find good agreement. From a biological point of view, our model uncovers the impact that individual nutrients and the synergistic interaction between nutrient pairs have on growth, and suggests that we can understand the growth maximization principle as the optimization of nutrient synergies.
authors.affiliation: Departament d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain.
authors.forename: Francesco Alessandro
authors.initials: FA
authors.lastname: Massucci
authors.affiliation: Departament d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain.|Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona 08010, Spain.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Guimerà
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.|Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO), Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.|Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
authors.forename: Luís A Nunes
authors.initials: LA
authors.lastname: Amaral
authors.affiliation: Departament d'Enginyeria Química, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, 43007 Tarragona, Spain.
authors.forename: Marta
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sales-Pardo
mesh_terms: D018533:Biomass; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006128:Growth; D008827:Microbiological Phenomena; D008954:Models, Biological