Substrate Depletion Oscillator

Publication

Tyson, J. J., Chen, K. C., & Novak, B. (2003).
Sniffers, buzzers, toggles and blinkers: dynamics of regulatory and signaling pathways in the cell.
Current opinion in cell biology, 15(2), 221-231.

PMID: 12648679   DOI: 10.1016/S0955-0674(03)00017-6

Description

This ModelBrick from the article, “Sniffers, buzzers, toggles and blinkers…” describes a substrate-depletion oscillator. Species X is converted into R in an autocatalytic process. At first, X is abundant and R is scarce. As R builds up, R production accelerates until there is an explosive conversion of the entire pool of X into R. Then the autocatalytic reaction shuts off for lack of substrate, X. R is degraded, and X must build up again before another burst of R is produced. This is essentially the mechanism of MPF oscillations in frog egg extracts.

Reaction Diagram

Images

Downloads

VCell ModelBrick	download model (.vcml)	Designed with VCell
SBML

Contributors

Michael Blinov, John Albanese