“…Models for metabolic networks are being developed to support fundamental biological research [10]. However, due to lack of available data, most models that couple cellular uptake to transport in cartilage tissue engineering adopt a far simpler, workable, approach by considering only a single solute assumed to be critical [9,11,22,33,34], or alternatively, couple glucose, oxygen and lactate using a simple mass balance [42]. On the other hand, in related tissues such as the intervertebral disk, models have been based on actual, empirically measured, coupled relationships [31].…”