Abstract Lipolysis is a life-essential metabolic process, which supplies fatty acids stored in lipid droplets to the body in order to match the demands of building new cells and providing cellular energy. In this paper, we present a first mathematical modelling approach for lipolysis, which takes into account that the involved enzymes act on the surface of lipid droplets. We postulate an active region near the surface where the substrates are within reach of the surface-bound enzymes and formulate a system of reaction-diffusion PDEs, which connect the active region to the inner core of lipid droplets via interface conditions. We establish two numerical discretisations based on finite element method and isogeometric analysis, and validate them to perform reliably. Since numerical tests are best performed on non-zero explicit stationary state solutions, we introduce and analyse a model, which describes besides lipolysis also a reverse process (yet in a physiologically much oversimplified way). The system is not coercive such that establishing well-posedness is a non-standard task. We prove the unique existence of global and equilibrium solutions. We establish exponential convergence to the equilibrium solutions using the entropy method. We then study the stationary state model and compute explicitly for radially symmetric solutions. Concerning the finite element methods, we show numerically the linear and quadratic convergence of the errors with respect to the H^1 H 1 - and L^2 L 2 -norms, respectively. Finally, we present numerical simulations of a prototypical PDE model of lipolysis and illustrate that enzyme clustering on lipid droplets can significantly slow down lipolysis.
Apel et al. (Tue,) studied this question.