Growth strategy of microbes on mixed carbon sources
Abstract
A classic problem in microbiology is that bacteria display two types of growth behavior when cultured on a mixture of two carbon sources: the two sources are sequentially consumed one after another (diauxie) or they are simultaneously consumed (co-utilization). The search for the molecular mechanism of diauxie led to the discovery of the lac operon. However, questions remain as why microbes would bother to have different strategies of taking up nutrients. Here we show that diauxie versus co-utilization can be understood from the topological features of the metabolic network. A model of optimal allocation of protein resources quantitatively explains why and how the cell makes the choice. In case of co-utilization, the model predicts the percentage of each carbon source in supplying the amino acid pools, which is quantitatively verified by experiments. Our work solves a long-standing puzzle and provides a quantitative framework for the carbon source utilization of microbes.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.08791,
title = {Growth strategy of microbes on mixed carbon sources},
author = {Xin Wang and Kang Xia and Xiaojing Yang and Chao Tang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.08791},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Manuscript 25 pages 4 Figures, Supplemental Information 52 pages, 7 SI Tables, 7 SI Figures