Trehalose-6-phosphate synthase and stabilization of yeast glycolysis

‘Lost in transition: Startup of glycolysis yields subpopulations of nongrowing cells…’ (‘LIT’, van Heerden et al. 2014) is a massive paper from groups in Amsterdam and Delft, which deals with broad issues in metabolism and cell heterogeneity, as addressed for the predominant metabolic pathway, glycolysis, in the context of a long studied but incompletely understood yeast mutant which is impaired in use of glucose without evident direct defects in the pathway.

The primary approach is the quite original one of predicting, for the mutant, the dynamics of metabolism upon glucose addition, based on a mathematical model using the known kinetics for the enzymes of the pathway. Here we will discuss this paper and provide some additional model simulations illuminating the model.