Hunt KA, von Netzer F, Gorman-Lewis D, Stahl DA. (2022) Microbial maintenance energy quantified and modeled with microcalorimetry. Biotechnol Bioeng. 2022 Jun 9; [DOI]:10.1002/bit.28155. {PMID}: 35680566 OSTI:1874049
All known biology is driven by the partitioning of energy released from nutrient consumption, either into building new cells or maintaining cellular integrity required for viability. The energy invested in maintaining viable cellular structure is known as the maintenance energy cost. The relative amount of energy allocated to maintenance (rather than growth) is known to change with stress, metabolism, and the organism. Although this variable energy cost is of fundamental importance to predicting microbial behavior under different environmental conditions, it has been extremely difficult to quantify.
We developed an experimental framework to infer the relative partitioning of cellular energy between growth and maintaining cellular viability, which is based on established thermodynamic relationships for metabolism and mathematical relationships for microbial activity (previously employed for continuous culturing methods). We extend these methods to describe and predict the behavior of an organism in response to temperature stress, not only under steady state conditions but at the limits of growth difficult to determine in continuous culturing methods due to technical limitations.
The presented framework is expected to be applicable to a range of organisms, metabolisms, and environments relevant to biotechnological and ecological systems.
Contact
David A. Stahl
University of Washington
Principal Investigator
dastahl@uw.edu