This thesis presents the development and analysis of a macro-chemical kinetics model of microbial metabolism and growth, belonging to the class of Variable-Internal-Stores (VIS) models. Such models can account for changes in the internal state of a micro-organism in response to variations in environmental conditions. In addition to VIS, the model developed in the present thesis describes the adaptive allocation of molecular building blocks among various types of catalytic machinery by means of so-called ‘regulatory rules’ which can be reconstructed from observational data, as shown in Chapter 4. In Chapter 2 I show that this novel VIS-with-reallocation model has a unique, stable equilibrium point and reduces to classical models of microbial growth and metabolism. In Chapter 3 this mathematical model is treated as a piecewise smooth system, which allows me to investigate the behaviour of the model under conditions of starvation, and, in particular, to describe this behaviour in terms of Fillipov sliding modes. In Chapter 4, I study the response of the model to time-varying environmental conditions of the ‘feast-or-famine’ type of nutrient limitation, where I address the question of maximally adaptive regulation of reserve densities and show that optimal reserve management is governed by the frequency of environmental fluctuations on time scale comparable to that of the organism’s physiology.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:737681 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Nev, Olga |
| Publisher | University of Warwick |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/98232/ |
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