Azohydromonas lata chemostat culture and metabolic model

A complementary experimental and modeling approach was used to analyze the production of PHB in chemostat cultures of A. lata DSM1123. The counterintuitive PHB accumulation under glucose-limited conditions, a situation where only biomass production should be observed, can be explained as the result of two internal metabolic constraints: a limited flow through the Krebs cycle and a maximum metabolically active protein. Given the predictive power and simplicity of the model, it may be used for assessing the impact of expressing synthetic pathways for target metabolites production, where the new enzymes must compete for the total protein pool.