Modelling the Calvin cycle

Some years ago the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Plant Physiology organized a conference on metabolic networks. I decided to see what was going on in the institute next to the one where I work and I went to some of the talks. The one which I found most interesting was by Zoran Nikoloski. His subject was certain models for the Calvin cycle, which is part of photosynthesis. A motivating question was whether photosynthesis can work in two different stable steady states. If that were the case it might be possible to influence the plant to move from one state to another and, in the best case, to increase its production of biomass. This is of interest for biotechnology. Mathematically the question is that of multistationarity, i.e. whether a system of evolution equations admits more than one stationary solution. Beyond this it is of interest whether there can be more than one stable stationary solution. In fact in this context the issue is not that of absolute uniqueness of stationary solutions but of uniqueness within a given stoichiometric compatibility class. This means that the solution is unique when certain conserved quantities are fixed. One thing I found attractive about the presentation was that the speaker was talking about rigorous mathematical results on the dynamics and not just about numerically calculating a few solutions.

If the system is modelled deterministically and diffusion is neglected there results a system of ordinary differential equations for the concentrations of the substances involved as functions of time. It is necessary to choose which substances should be included in the description. In a basic model of the Calvin cycle there are five substances. In the work discussed in the talk of Nikoloski and in a paper he wrote with Sergio Grimbs and others (Biosystems 303, 212) various ODE systems based on this starting point are considered. They differ by the type of kinetics used. They consider mass action kinetics (MA), extended Michaelis-Menten kinetics where the enzymes catalysing the reactions are included explicitly (MM-MA) and effective Michaelis-Menten (MM) obtained from the system MM-MA by a singular limit. The systems MA and MM consist of five equations while the system MM-MA consists of nineteen equations. In the paper of Grimbs et. al. they show among other things that the system MM never admits a stable stationary solution, whatever the reaction constants, while the system MM-MA can exhibit two different stationary solutions.

After the talk I started reading about this subject and I also talked to Nikoloski about it. Later I began doing some research on these systems myself. Some technical difficulties which arose (which I wrote about in a previous post) led me to consult Juan Velázquez and he joined me in this project. Now we have written a paper on models for the Calvin cycle. In a case where there is only one stationary solution and it is unstable it is of interest to consider the final fate of general solutions of the system. For some initial conditions the concentrations of all substances tend to zero at late times. For other data (a whole open set) we were able to show that all concentrations tend to infinity as . We called the latter class runaway solutions. These do not seem to be of direct biological relevance but they might be helpful in choosing between alternative models which are more or less appropriate. The proof of the existence of runaway solutions for the MA system is somewhat complicated since this turns out to be a system with two different timescales. The system MM-MA also admits runaway solutions. Although the system is larger than MA the existence proof is simpler and in fact can be carried out in the context of a larger class of systems. Runaway solutions are also found for the system MM.

In the paper of Grimbs et. al. one system is considered which includes the effect of diffusion. Restricting to homogeneous solutions of this system gives a system of ODE called MAdh which is different from the system MA. The difference is that while the concentration of ATP is a dynamical variable in MAdh it is taken to be constant in MA. We showed that the system MAdh has zero, one or two solutions depending on the values of the parameters and that all solutions are bounded. Thus runaway solutions are ruled out. Intuitively this is due to the fact that the supply of energy is bounded but this heuristic argument is far from providing a proof. There are many other models of the Calvin cycle in the literature. In general they consider the reactions between a larger class of substances. It is an interesting task for the future to extend the results obtained up to now to these more general models. This post has been very much concerned with the mathematics of the problem and has not said much about the biology. The reactions making up the Calvin cycle were determined experimentally by Melvin Calvin and I can highly recommend his Nobel lecture as a description of how this was achieved