Fig. 1
From: Metabolic host responses to malarial infection during the intraerythrocytic developmental cycle
Schematic description for calculating metabolic fluxes in Plasmodium falciparum and human red blood cells. a Uninfected and infected human red blood cell (RBC) cultures. We simulated metabolic activity within RBCs for two cell culture conditions, i.e., an uninfected culture that consists of normal RBCs and an infected culture consisting of P. falciparum-infected RBCs and cocultured uninfected RBCs. b Modeling framework. In order to describe metabolism in the infected cultured system, we used separate metabolic network descriptions for each RBC component. The P. falciparum model was imbedded in a separate compartment of the infected RBC, allowing metabolite uptake and secretion between these entities. Direct metabolite uptake and secretion with the medium was only possible for the infected and cocultured RBC model. c Workflow of flux calculations. We used experimental metabolomic data of the uninfected RBC culture [16] to determine normal and cocultured RBC fluxes using the RBC metabolic network. As for infected RBCs, we combined RBC and P. falciparum metabolic networks into one integrated network and incorporated the parasite’s gene expression data to predict both host RBC and P. falciparum metabolic fluxes. cRBC, cocultured uninfected RBCs; iRBC, P. falciparum-infected RBCs; nRBC, normal RBCs; MN Pf , metabolic network of P. falciparum; MNRBC, metabolic network of RBC; NIC, number of internal compartments; NM, number of metabolites; NR, number of reactions; RPMI, Roswell Park Memorial Institute