Global Gene Regulation in Metabolic Networks
Résumé
Genetic feedback is one of the mechanisms that enables metabolic adaptations to environmental changes. The stable equilibria of these feedback circuits determine the observable metabolic phenotypes. We consider an unbranched metabolic network with one metabolite acting as a global regulator of enzyme expression. Under switch-like regulation and exploiting the time scale separation between metabolic and genetic dynamics, we develop geometric criteria to characterize the equilibria of a given network. These results can be used to detect mono- and bistability in terms of the gene regulation parameters for any combination of activation and repression loops