Introduction

Propane is a commonly used, convenient and clean-burning fuel, currently produced from non-renewable sources. Our project is about producing propane in bacteria, paving way for its sustainable production from renewable biomass. Ultimately, the pathway could be transferred to cyanobacteria, producing propane from CO2 and solar energy.

In our mathematical model our goal is to grasp the important concepts underlying the experiments made in the lab, and to see how those concepts could help us produce more propane. By having a better understanding of the ideas that govern our project, we could see the influence of each compound in the reaction pathway and have a basis to make decisions that would have a long term impact in our results.

Materials and methods: Building the model / our pathway

We built a model of our propane pathway based on Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics. It is a basic way to model enzyme reactions that assumes that the change that enzyme causes is faster than the binding of the enzyme and releasing of the substrate.

--picture of pathway somewhere here--

Not all enzyme reactions in our pathway happen the same way, and thus they need to be modeled with various different ways. For more specific information about how each enzyme reaction is modeled and about the constants involved see our page of enzyme kinetics.

For modeling this propane pathway we used Copasi and Matlab.

Results and implications

Here text about our results in all subcategories:

Car-activation

Bottlenecks: Comparing enzyme rates

Time course

Stability analysis

Sensitivity analysis

Discussion