Mechanistic modeling of bacterial nutrient uptake strategies

Bacteria have developed a variety of strategies to nd and consume the substrates necessary for both the cell's energy-consuming processes and for the additional biomass needed to replicate. A greater understanding of the diversity and regulation of these strategies can provide us with a number of insights relevant for a variety of applications, from predicting bacterial population dynamics and thus carbon-cycling rates in the ocean to bio-engineering bacteria into microscale robots. Here I use toy, mechanistic models of single-cell metabolism that allow me to quantify the costs and benefits of various nutrient uptake strategies. I find that: (i) a sensing-uptake trade-off governs E. coli's regulation of maltose uptake and chemotaxis to maltose; (ii) a rate-affinity trade-off in nutrient transport systems governs the speciation of marine oligotrophic and copiotrophic heterotrophs; and (iii) an exploration-conservation trade-off governs the prevalence of motility in the marine microbial world. This work thus provides new understanding of how both phenotypic diversity and cellular regulation are governed by trade-offs for maximizing growth rate in dierent environments.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Norris, Noele Rosalie.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Emilio Frazzoli and Roman Stocker.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/124116

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/124116