Description
Escherichia coli growth is strongly regulated by environmental conditions, evoking a stringent response when nutrient supplies are low and exponential growth when nutrient levels are high. This paper sets out to simulate Escherichia coli growth with a guanosine tetraphosphate controlled stringent response by building a system of differential equations that model the growth of proteins, RNA, and RNA polymerase. Parameters of the system were successfully obtained by solving the multidimensional unconstrained minimization problem by using a Nelder-Mead simplex scheme and literature data. The final set of differential equations and fitted parameters give the desired dynamics of Escherichia coli growth and make a nice framework for future studies, which will incorporate more biological aspects of cell growth and utilize additional analytical and numerical methods.
