Enzyme-Constrained Metabolic Modeling Reveals CO2-Dependent Growth Control in Picochlorum celeri

Enzyme-constrained modeling of Picochlorum celeri shows CO2-dependent growth control where relaxing urea carboxylase alone boosts growth by 627% in air and 78% at elevated CO2.

• Why it matters: The gap is explaining how P. celeri grows 11.6 times faster under elevated CO2 despite only a 17% increase in metabolic enzyme abundance.
• What they did: They reconstructed iPiccel954 (3525 reactions, 2973 metabolites, 954 genes) and an enzyme-constrained version, eciPiccel954, calibrated to measured proteomes in air versus elevated CO2.
• The result: Bottleneck analysis predicts many limiting enzymes with different identities across conditions, and proteome measurements support the predicted bottleneck enzymes, implying growth hinges on protein-budget allocation.

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