(352f) Host Metabolic Interaction During Viral Infection: A Model of Bacteriophage T7 In E. Coli

Bacteriophage progeny, and in fact all viruses, are metabolic products of the infected host cell. Viral replication competes with the host for use of both synthesis machinery and metabolic precursors.  A thorough understanding of the host-viral metabolic interaction will add significantly to the basic understanding of phage, as well as facilitate efforts to restrict or employ their spread. E. coli metabolism has been modeled extensively using Flux Balance Analysis, and phage T7 replication has been described in structured detail using ordinary differential equations.  Developing an integrated simulation method requires additions to the independent component models, as well as construction of a new algorithm to enforce mutual limitation by the two models. Our integrated simulation enables exploration of the constraints placed on phage replication by the host metabolic capacity, as well as the dynamic perturbation of the host network state. The model predicts nutritional perturbations that have a strong impact on viral replication, which we demonstrate experimentally.