A Trade-off between Force and Flow May Lead to Reduced Entropy Production Rate during Faster Microbial Growth
Maarten J. Droste, Maaike Remeijer, Robert Planqué, Frank J. Bruggeman
TL;DR
This paper explores how microbes might reduce their energy waste during faster growth by changing their metabolic strategies.
Contribution
The paper introduces a general criterion to predict when energy waste per biomass decreases during metabolic shifts in microbes.
Findings
Optimizing resource allocation can lead to metabolic pathways with lower driving force but higher flux.
A general criterion is derived to predict when energy waste per biomass decreases during metabolic switches.
Experiments are proposed to test if energy waste can decrease with faster microbial growth.
Abstract
Thermodynamics dictates that the entropy production rate (EPR) of a steady-state isothermal chemical reaction network rises with reaction rates. Living cells can, in addition, alter reaction rates by changing enzyme concentrations, giving them control over metabolic activities. Here, we ask whether microbial cells can break this relation between EPR and reaction rates by shifting to a metabolism with lower thermodynamic driving force (per unit of biomass) at faster growth. First, we study an example metabolic network to illustrate that maximization of metabolic flux by optimal allocation of resources can indeed lead to selection of a pathway with a lower driving force. This pathway then compensates for the reduction in driving force by relying on fewer enzymes with sufficiently increased concentrations, resulting in a higher flux. Next, we investigate the EPR per unit biomass of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics · Process Optimization and Integration · Global Energy and Sustainability Research