Towards a full quantitative description of yeast metabolism a systematic approach for estimating the kinetic parameters of isoenzymes under in vivo like conditions.

In order to produce a full quantitative description of yeast metabolism, a number of kinetic parameters of enzymes that are important for energy metabolism must be determined experimentally. We aim to determine the prospective in vivo kinetic properties of a range of yeast-purified isoenzymes that are important in energy metabolism, with respect to the concentration of their substrates and products. This endeavor forms part of our systems biology pipeline to facilitate the production of bottom-up models of metabolism. Within this workflow, we implement an infrastructure for medium- to high-throughput determination of the kinetic properties of purified isoenzymes in in vivo like conditions. This includes the use of the KineticsWizard software for data capture and analysis. The captured experimental data are analyzed by the software and subsequently stored in appropriate repositories (MeMo-RK and SABIO-RK). While we focus initially on glycolysis in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, our methodology is generic and can be widely applied to the study of other enzymes and pathways in yeast and other organisms.