摘要：AbstractThe deterministic model developed by Graham et al. [2020], which is the approximation in large population of a stochastic model, allowed the authors to propose a ‘macroscopic description’ of metabolic heterogeneity ofEscherichia coligrowing on glucose and xylose. However, these models did not include any mechanistic model to explain the variations of the duration of the ‘lag-phase’ observed when the glucose is exhausted and before the xylose is being consumed. Here, we propose a deterministic mechanistic model to explain howE. coliswitches its consumption of a sugar to another one depending on the dynamic of intracellular XylR molecules. The model is developed and investigated numerically. It reveals some important observability issues.
