Modeling the respiratory chain complexes with biothermokinetic equations — The case of complex I

Abstract The mitochondrial respiratory chain plays a crucial role in energy metabolism and its dysfunction is implicated in a wide range of human diseases. In order to understand the global expression of local mutations in the rate of oxygen consumption or in the production of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) it is useful to have a mathematical model in which the changes in a given respiratory complex are properly modeled. Our aim in this paper is to provide thermodynamics respecting and structurally simple equations to represent the kinetics of each isolated complexes which can, assembled in a dynamical system, also simulate the behavior of the respiratory chain, as a whole, under a large set of different physiological and pathological conditions. On the example of the reduced nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH)–ubiquinol–oxidoreductase (complex I) we analyze the suitability of different types of rate equations. Based on our kinetic experiments we show that very simple rate laws, as those often used in many respiratory chain models, fail to describe the kinetic behavior when applied to a wide concentration range. This led us to adapt rate equations containing the essential parameters of enzyme kinetic, maximal velocities and Henri–Michaelis–Menten like-constants (K M and K I ) to satisfactorily simulate these data.