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Abstract

A mathematical model to describe carbon catabolite repression in Escherichia coli is developed and in part validated. The model is aggregated from two functional units describing glucose and lactose transport and degradation. Both units are members of the erp modulon and are under control of a global signal transduction system which calculates the signals that turn on or off gene expression for the specific enzymes. Using isogenic mutant strains, our model is validated by a set of experiments. In these experiments, substrate composition of the preculture and of the experimental culture are varied in order to stimulate the system in different ways. With the obtained measurements (three states in the liquid phase and one intracellular component) a part of the model parameters could be estimated. Therefore all experiments could be sufficiently described with a single set of parameters. (C) 2001 Academic Press.