Modeling Pheromone Production Overview

Pheromones production rates are estimated when the system is in stationary state with an FBA (Flux Balance Analysis). This can be useful to know about the amount of pheromone that can be produced by the synthetic plant during a certain period of time, once the system has ended its transitory levels of pheromone production.

Flux Balance Analysis

Flux balance analysis (FBA) is a mathematical approach for analyzing the flow of metabolites through a metabolic network. FBA is a widely used for studying biochemical networks, in particular the genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions that have been built in the past decade. These reconstructions contain all of the known metabolic reactions in an organism or plant, and the genes that encode each enzyme. In our case, FBA will calculate the flow of metabolites through our metabolic network to obtain the major production of pheromone.

CROBA

The COnstraints Based Reconstruction and Analysis (COBRA) approach to systems biology accepts the fact that we do not possess sufficiently detailed parameter data to precisely model, in the biophysical sense, an organism or plant at the genome scale [1]. The COBRA Toolbox [2] is a freely available Matlab toolbox can be used to perform a variety of COBRA methods, including many FBA-based methods. Models for the COBRA Toolbox are saved in the Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML).