Bayesian inference of metabolic kinetics from genome-scale multiomics data

Abstract

Modern biological tools generate a wealth of data on metabolite and protein concentrations that can be used to help inform new strain designs. However, integrating these data sources to generate predictions of steady-state metabolism typically requires a kinetic description of the enzymatic reactions that occur within a cell. Parameterizing these kinetic models from biological data can be computationally difficult, especially as the amount of data increases. Robust methods must also be able to quantify the uncertainty in model parameters as a function of the available data, which can be particularly computationally intensive. The field of Bayesian inference offers a wide range of methods for estimating distributions in parameter uncertainty. However, these techniques are poorly suited to kinetic metabolic modeling due to the complex kinetic rate laws typically employed and the resulting dynamic system that must be solved. In this paper, we employ linear-logarithmic kinetics to simplify the calculation of steady-state flux distributions and enable efficient sampling and variational inference methods. We demonstrate that detailed information on the posterior distribution of kinetic model parameters can be obtained efficiently at a variety of different problem scales, including large-scale kinetic models trained on multiomics datasets. These results allow modern Bayesian machine learning tools to be leveraged in understanding biological data and developing new, efficient strain designs.