Chalmers Conferences, 9th European Conference on Mathematical and Theoretical Biology

Extending the Limits of Bifurcation Analysis: an Illustration from Yeast Glycolysis
Gosse Borger Overal

Last modified: 2014-03-31

Abstract


The qualitative behaviour of nonlinear differential equations for biochemical reaction networks can be studied using analytical bifurcation analysis. Often this is restricted to systems with dimension 3 or less. However, metabolic networks are tightly structured, and such structure is usually not taken into account. Yeast glycolysis has been studied for many decades, and detailed models exist. It is, so far, impossible to perform qualitative analysis on such models. Here, we show that qualitative analysis can be conducted on a 5-dimensional, nonlinear model in yeast glycolysis. A bifurcation connecting the trivial and nontrivial steady states is explicitly computed, and an experimentally observed bistability is shown to exist in the model.

Keywords


Yeast; Glycolysis; Bifurcation;