Macroscopic metabolic oscillations in yeast can be observed experimentally
in a CSTR under specific conditions. A question of great importance for
modelling yeast metabolism is then how to relate the macroscopic measuraments
to the individual cells. Using theory for coupled oscillators, we show
here that the problem is not trivial, since transitions with very different
phenomena at the cellular level can show macroscopically the same features
observed in the experiments.
Such different phenomena, however, can be resolved measuring precursors
of the oscillations when the system is before the transition, i.e., in
the steady state. These precursors appear as deviation from the linear
behaviour in the perturbation response and allow to identify the type of
the transition without ambiguity and in an experimentally feasible way.