Modeling and simulation of the main metabolism in Escherichia coli and its several single-gene knockout mutants with experimental verification

摘要

BackgroundIt is quite important to simulate the metabolic changes of a cell in response to the change in culture environment and/or specific gene knockouts particularly for the purpose of application in industry. If this could be done, the cell design can be made without conducting exhaustive experiments, and one can screen out the promising candidates, proceeded by experimental verification of a select few of particular interest. Although several models have so far been proposed, most of them focus on the specific metabolic pathways. It is preferred to model the whole of the main metabolic pathways in Escherichia coli, allowing for the estimation of energy generation and cell synthesis, based on intracellular fluxes and that may be used to characterize phenotypic growth.