Team:Aalto-Helsinki/Modeling propane

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Under construction

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.

We separated our modeling in three modules:

Derministic modeling of the reaction pathway

Finding bottlenecks in our reactions, identifying which substrates could be overproduced, and comprehending better the role each component, as the substrates concentrations, plays in our pathway are a few of the reasons we decided to do a deterministic model. With the help of differential equations applied to each reaction, we could have simultaneously a specific and a broad view of our pathway.

Sensitivity analysis

We wanted to go further in our understanding of the main reaction pathway. By completing our deterministic model, it became easier for us to interpret how each substrate affects another one in our system. This is crucial for us to then invest more resources in those substrates that affect the most our propane production, the main goal of this project.

Stability analysis

We wanted to know whether our pathway could produce propane steadily. In order to understand if this would be plausible, we performed a stability analysis of our reaction. To conclude these calculations, we used again the ideas behind our deterministic modeling.