Reduction of a Kinetic Model of the Carbon Starvation Response in Escherichia coli

A large and complex network of biochemical reactions, involving genes, mRNAs, proteins, metabolites, and signalling molecules, controls the adaptation of the bacterium Escherichia coli to environmental changes. In order to better understand the functioning of this network, we develop a kinetic model, which takes the form of a large system of nonlinear ODEs, including different time scales. We reduce the system dimension by making a quasi-steady-state assumption, and further approximate the reduced model into a piecewise-linear model. This allows us to qualitatively analyze the response of E. coli to carbon-source availability.