Soybean plants form symbiotic relationships with Bradyrhizobia bacteria, where the plant supplies carbon to the bacteria in exchange for nitrogen. There is a lot of interest around understanding this relationship to improve plant growth and decrease the need for fertilizers. To understand more about this exchange of carbon and nitrogen, we are developing a kinetic model of key metabolic reactions in soybean nodules. We are also exploring additional parameter estimation approaches, including machine learning algorithms that predict kinetic parameters from protein sequences and global optimization algorithms to fit against experimental data, to calibrate our model to soybean nodules. Once developed, this model will provide insight into potential bottlenecks that could be engineered to improve nitrogen fixation efficiency. This presentation will provide a comprehensive overview of the nitrogen fixation process in soybean nodules, illustrate the associated metabolic and kinetic models, and discuss the challenges and limitations currently facing this area of research.
