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Bioenergetic regularities determining the maximal biomass yield in aerobic microbial growth on various substrates have been considered. The approach is based on the method of mass-energy balance and application of GenMetPath computer program package. An equation system describing the balances of quantities of 1) metabolite reductivity and 2) high-energy bonds formed and expended has been formulated. In order to formulate the system, the whole metabolism is subdivided into constructive and energetic partial metabolisms. The constructive metabolism is, in turn, subdivided into two parts: forward and standard. The latter subdivision is based on the choice of nodal metabolites. The forward constructive metabolism is substantially dependent on growth substrate: it converts the substrate into the standard set of nodal metabolites. The latter is, then, converted into biomass macromolecules by the standard constructive metabolism which is the same on various substrates. Variations of flows via nodal metabolites are shown to exert minor effects on the standard constructive metabolism. As a separate case, the growth on substrates requiring the participation of oxygenases and/or oxidase is considered. The bioenergetic characteristics of the standard constructive metabolism are found from a large amount of data for the growth of various organisms on glucose. The described approach can be used for prediction of biomass growth yield on substrates with known reactions of their primary metabolization. As an example, the growth of a yeast culture on ethanol has been considered. The value of maximal growth yield predicted by the method described here showed very good consistency with the value found experimentally.

The biomass growth yield is the ratio of the newly synthesized substance of growing cells to the amount of the consumed substrate, the source of matter and energy for cell growth. The yield is a characteristic of the efficiency of substrate conversion to cell biomass. The conversion is carried out by the cell metabolism, which is a complete aggregate of biochemical reactions occurring in the cells.

This work newly considers the problem of maximal cell growth yield prediction basing on balances of the whole living cell metabolism and its fragments called as partial metabolisms (PM). The following PM’s are used for the present consideration. During growth on any substrate we consider i) the standard constructive metabolism (SCM) which consists of identical pathways during growth of various organisms on any substrate. SCM starts from several standard compounds (nodal metabolites): glucose, acetyl-CoA 2-oxoglutarate, erythrose-4-phosphate, oxaloacetate, ribose-5- phosphate, 3-phosphoglycerate, phosphoenolpyruvate, and pyruvate, and ii) the full forward metabolism (FM) — the remaining part of the whole metabolism. The first one consumes high-energy bonds (HEB) formed by the second one. In this work we examine a generalized variant of the FM, when the possible presence of extracellular products, as well as the possibilities of both aerobic and anaerobic growth are taken into account. Instead of separate balances of each nodal metabolite formation as it was made in our previous work, this work deals at once with the whole aggregate of these metabolites. This makes the problem solution more compact and requiring a smaller number of biochemical quantities and substantially less computational time. An equation expressing the maximal biomass yield via specific amounts of HEB formed and consumed by the partial metabolisms has been derived. It includes the specific HEB consumption by SCM which is a universal biochemical parameter applicable to the wide range of organisms and growth substrates. To correctly determine this parameter, the full constructive metabolism and its forward part are considered for the growth of cells on glucose as the mostly studied substrate. We used here the found earlier properties of the elemental composition of lipid and lipid-free fractions of cell biomass. Numerical study of the effect of various interrelations between flows via different nodal metabolites has been made. It showed that the requirements of the SCM in high-energy bonds and NAD(P)H are practically constants. The found HEB-to-formed-biomass coefficient is an efficient tool for finding estimates of maximal biomass yield from substrates for which the primary metabolism is known. Calculation of ATP-to-substrate ratio necessary for the yield estimation has been made using the special computer program package, GenMetPath.

The paper presents a computational model of the thermal state of the breast with an interstitial tumor. The model is based on the modified Pennes biothermal equation and describes a five-layered biological area including skin, subcutaneous fat, glandular and muscular tissues, as well as a neoplasm zone. Convective heat exchange with the environment is taken into account at the outer boundary, and body temperature is maintained at the internal boundary. In addition, the fabric surface is exposed to exponentially attenuating effects of spatial heating, such a heating scheme is actually based on the Bouguer – Lambert – Baer law. Tissue thermal conductivity and blood perfusion are modeled by linear functions of temperature, reflecting physiological thermoregulation. The boundary-value problem for the partial differential equation has been solved numerically using an explicit-implicit finite difference scheme; the system of algebraic equations getting after an approximation of the mentioned boundary-value problem is solved by the Thomas procedure. Numerical experiments have shown that even a small tumor increases the local temperature of tissues by half a degree due to increased metabolism and delayed blood perfusion. This anomaly is clearly manifested in tumors larger than ten millimeters. It was found that the depth of occurrence critically affects the thermal response: when the tumor is located closer to the surface, the maximum temperature shifts to the skin, whereas at a deeper position, a thermal peak forms inside the glandular tissue. The effectiveness of hyperthermic exposure was assessed by the integral criterion of thermal necrosis based on the Arrhenius law. At a radiation intensity that creates a surface thermal load of about five kilowatts per square meter and an attenuation factor of one hundred, tumor destruction begins after two to three minutes of exposure, while the surrounding healthy tissues remain within safe temperatures. Reducing the attenuation coefficient leads to the opposite effect: heat spreads deeper, and the glandular tissue is damaged first, which limits the therapeutic window. Additionally, maps of the distribution of temperature, time to necrosis, and the depth of thermal damage were constructed depending on the irradiation power, diameter, and position of the tumor.