TY - JOUR T1 - Testing Biochemistry Revisited: How In Vivo Metabolism Can Be Understood from In Vitro Enzyme Kinetics A1 - van Eunen, Karen A1 - Kiewiet, José A. L. A1 - Westerhoff, Hans V. A1 - Bakker, Barbara M. Y1 - 2012/04/26 N2 - Author Summary Baker's yeast is widely applied in modern biotechnology, for instance for production of heterologous protein or biofuel. For such applications a thorough understanding of the central energy metabolism of the bug is crucial. Nevertheless, even for this well-known organism, attempts to build models ab initio, based on independently measured characteristics of the catalysts (the enzymes), seldom gives reliable results. A key problem in this field is that enzyme characteristics are often studied under non-physiological conditions that do not resemble the environment inside the cell. In this study we measured the enzyme characteristics under physiological conditions and assembled the results into a computational model of yeast energy metabolism. We show that this simple trick greatly improves the predictive value of the computational model. This allowed us to predict correctly how yeast cells adapt to nitrogen starvation, an industrially relevant situation, in which remodeling of the proteome strongly affects cellular energy metabolism. JF - PLOS Computational Biology JA - PLOS Computational Biology VL - 8 IS - 4 UR - https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002483 SP - e1002483 EP - PB - Public Library of Science M3 - doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002483 ER -