Metabolic compartmentation - a system level property of muscle cells: real problems of diffusion in living cells. - Inserm - Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale Access content directly
Journal Articles International Journal of Molecular Sciences Year : 2008

Metabolic compartmentation - a system level property of muscle cells: real problems of diffusion in living cells.

Abstract

Problems of quantitative investigation of intracellular diffusion and compartmentation of metabolites are analyzed. Principal controversies in recently published analyses of these problems for the living cells are discussed. It is shown that the formal theoretical analysis of diffusion of metabolites based on Fick's equation and using fixed diffusion coefficients for diluted homogenous aqueous solutions, but applied for biological systems in vivo without any comparison with experimental results, may lead to misleading conclusions, which are contradictory to most biological observations. However, if the same theoretical methods are used for analysis of actual experimental data, the apparent diffusion constants obtained are orders of magnitude lower than those in diluted aqueous solutions. Thus, it can be concluded that local restrictions of diffusion of metabolites in a cell are a system-level properties caused by complex structural organization of the cells, macromolecular crowding, cytoskeletal networks and organization of metabolic pathways into multienzyme complexes and metabolons. This results in microcompartmentation of metabolites, their channeling between enzymes and in modular organization of cellular metabolic networks. The perspectives of further studies of these complex intracellular interactions in the framework of Systems Biology are discussed.
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Dates and versions

inserm-00391390 , version 1 (08-01-2013)

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Valdur A. Saks, Nathalie Beraud, Theo Wallimann. Metabolic compartmentation - a system level property of muscle cells: real problems of diffusion in living cells.. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 2008, 9 (5), pp.751-67. ⟨10.3390/ijms9050751⟩. ⟨inserm-00391390⟩

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