Macroscopic Kinetic Effect of Cell-to-Cell Variation in Biochemical Reactions

Most currently employed methods to determine the forms and parameters of biochemical kinetics rely on the data averaged over an entire cell population. But even genetically identical cells under the same environmental conditions can show strong variations in molecular content, that potentially distort the actual kinetic forms and parameters of individual cells at population level. Here we investigate how systematically these population- and individual-level kinetics are deviated from each other, and find the implications in development of single-cell metabolomics.