Nutrient Availability Impacts Intracellular Metabolic Profiles in Digital Organisms.

Citation: Kannan, KSS, Patil, T, Vij, R, Loh, BJK, Ling, MHT. 2022. Nutrient Availability Impacts Intracellular Metabolic Profiles in Digital Organisms. Acta Scientific Microbiology 5(6): 18-25.

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The ability of organisms to utilize environmental chemicals as nutrients and adapt to changes in nutrient availability is a hallmark of life. Yet despite different environments, the concentration and osmolarity of intracellular metabolites are relatively constant across different organism. Although adaptation experiments can be performed, they are usually labour intensive and must be carried out in stepwise or gradual manner. On the other hand, digital organisms or computer-simulated organisms can be used to study adaptations to extreme conditions. Here, we examine the effects of nutrient levels on the metabolic profiles of organisms. Our results show that nutrient availability results in significantly different average intracellular metabolite amounts (F = 5166, p-value < 1E-200) at 1500th generation despite the range within one order but there is significant decline of the impact of nutrient availability on the amounts of intracellular metabolites with increasing generations (r = -0.995, F = 385, p-value = 3.98E-05). However, mean intracellular amounts of specific metabolites are significantly different across all 12 nutrient availabilities (14 ≤ F ≤ 1927, 4.1E-304 ≤ p-value ≤ 1.6E-22). This suggests that the impact of nutrient availability is beyond the overall intercellular metabolite amounts but at the level of individual metabolites.