Exploring metabolism flexibility in complex organisms through quantitative study of precursor sets for system outputs

Table 2 Three different computations of ATP balance for the mammary gland in different treatments

Biological model	Dataset	ATP balance	Proteic
Criteria of selection of a solution			turnover
Mammary-gland model (Figure 3)	(HB)	6628	0
Manual study based on cycle removal[23]	(Ctrl)	3081	0
	(CN)	2045	0
Mammary-gland model (Figure 3)	(HB)	6628	0
ATP optimization	(Ctrl)	3081	0
	(CN)	2045	0
Model of Hannigan- Baldwin [21]	(HB)	4375 = 6500-2125	0
Study of numerical equilibria of an ODE model[31]	(Ctrl)	Non available
	(CN)	Non available

Three natural assumptions are considered to model the mammary gland behavior: removal of all cycles, optimization of ATP production and study of the equilibria of a dedicated ODE-based model. All models exhibit considerable variability in their ATP balance (in mmol/h/half udder), which contradicts the assumption about the behavior of this organ. Moreover, quantitatively, the computed ATP balances are much higher than recent measurements. This suggests that ATP maximization cannot be considered as a natural objective function to model cow mammary behavior.

ISSN: 1752-0509