Title: How do bacteria do adaptive control?
Abstract: Single celled organisms such as bacteria are able to tune enzyme levels that catalyze the reaction pathways by which they eventually make new copies of themselves. Depending on nutrient conditions, more or less enzyme is invested in different parts of their reaction network, so that reaction rates are constantly high, and cellular growth rate is maximised. In this talk I will present an adaptive control mechanism designed to solve this problem. It involves an ODE system with two sets of algebraic equations attached. Through a detailed analysis of the steady state and maximisation problems, we show that the adaptive control is actually globally stable for a wide variety of pathways. This suggests that real bacteria might actually be able to perform such adaptive control mechanisms using gene regulation.