Resource allocation modeling for autonomous prediction of plant cell phenotypes.

Abstract

Predicting the plant cell response in complex environmental conditions is a challenge in plant biology. Here we developed a resource allocation model of cellular and molecular scale for the leaf photosynthetic cell of Arabidopsis thaliana, based on the Resource Balance Analysis (RBA) constraint-based modeling framework. The RBA model contains the metabolic network and the major macromolecular processes involved in the plant cell growth and survival and localized in cellular compartments. We simulated the model for varying environmental conditions of temperature, irradiance, partial pressure of CO 2 and O 2 , and compared RBA predictions to known resource distributions and quantitative phenotypic traits such as the relative growth rate, the C:N ratio, and finally to the empirical characteristics of CO 2 fixation given by the well-established Farquhar model. In comparison to other standard constraint-based modeling methods like Flux Balance Analysis, the RBA model makes accurate quantitative predictions without the need for empirical constraints. Altogether, we show that RBA significantly improves the autonomous prediction of plant cell phenotypes in complex environmental conditions, and provides mechanistic links between the genotype and the phenotype of the plant cell.

Plant phenotyping relevance

RBAモデルを用いて植物細胞の生長率やC:N比などの表現型を定量予測する計算手法の開発が中心であり、単なる生物学的実験ではない。

Code and data availability

The authors publicly release the paper-specific RBA leaf model (XML) and the PlantCellRBA simulation/analysis software on Forgemia, with explicit availability statements in the Data availability and Supplementary material sections. No plant image/sensor/phenotype measurement datasets from this paper are deposited; the