23. October 2015, 15:15

Ernst-Abbe-Platz 2, seminar room 3423

Dynamic optimization: a powerful approach to elucidate optimality principles within metabolism

Prof. Dr. Christoph Kaleta (Institut of Experimental Medicine, Christian-Albrechts-University Kiel), Jan Ewald (Department of Bioinformatics, FSU Jena)

Despite the aspiration of systems biology to be a holistic approach to understand metabolism, the dynamics are often neglected and only lowly resolved. To uncover principles behind the dynamics of regulation we formulated time-dependent optimization problems and used dynamic optimization to obtain the optimal control of metabolism. We investigated several aspects like pathway activation or impact of toxic intermediates and even protein assembly. Interestingly, we observed that the optimal regulation is related to cell characteristics e.g., operon structure, protein synthesis capacity or kinetic efficiency of a enzyme. The revealed optimality principles are verified in large scale data sets of a broad spectrum of organisms. Our results show that the dynamic of metabolism is complex as well as unjustly neglected, and can be understood by the assumption of optimality.