The elucidation of organism-scale metabolic networks necessitates the development of integrative methods to analyze and interpret the systemic properties of cellular metabolism. A shift in emphasis from single metabolic reactions to systemically defined pathways is one consequence of such an integrative analysis of metabolic systems. The constraints of systemic stoichiometry, and limited thermo...

Metabolism has frequently been analyzed from a network perspective. A major question is how network properties correlate with biological features like growth rates, flux patterns and enzyme essentiality. Using methods from graph theory as well as established topological categories of metabolic systems, we analyze the essentiality of metabolic reactions depending on the growth medium and identif...

We compare a large number of organisms with respect to their metabolic network functions. We measure such functions in terms of the synthesizing capacity of a network when it is provided with a few small chemical substances as external resources. We call this measure the scope and show that it is generally robust against structural alterations of the reaction network. Organisms can be separated...

Constraint-based modeling results in a convex polytope that defines a solution space containing all possible steady-state flux distributions. The properties of this polytope have been studied extensively using linear programming to find the optimal flux distribution under various optimality conditions and convex analysis to define its extreme pathways (edges) and elementary modes. The work pres...

We have compared 12 genome-scale models of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolic network published since 2003 to evaluate progress in reconstruction of the yeast metabolic network. We compared the genomic coverage, overlap of annotated metabolites, predictive ability for single gene essentiality with a selection of model parameters, and biomass production predictions in simulated nutrient-limi...

Metabolic networks are described as a set of pathways, each pathway being a set of biochemical reactions, mainly enzy-matic reactions. It is often considered that the global behavior of a metabolic network is characterized by the addition ofbehaviors of each pathway. But in fact, in such large networks it is difficult to predict the consequences of competitionbetween several enzymes...

Metabolic networks can be turned into kinetic models in a predefined steady state by sampling the reaction elasticities in this state. Elasticities for many reversible rate laws can be computed from the reaction Gibbs free energies, which are determined by the state, and from physically unconstrained saturation values. Starting from a network structure with allosteric regulation and consistent ...