Functional stoichiometric analysis of metabolic networks.
BACKGROUND
An important tool in Systems Biology is the stoichiometric modeling of metabolic networks, where the stationary states of the network are described by a high-dimensional polyhedral cone, the so-called flux cone. Exhaustive descriptions of the metabolism can be obtained by computing the elementary vectors of this cone but, owing to a combinatorial explosion of the number of elementary vectors, this approach becomes computationally intractable for genome scale networks.


RESULTS
Hence, we propose to instead focus on the conversion cone, a projection of the flux cone, which describes the interaction of the metabolism with its external chemical environment. We present a direct method for calculating the elementary vectors of this cone and, by studying the metabolism of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, we demonstrate that such an analysis is computationally feasible even for genome scale networks.
Urbanczik
R
R
Institute of Pharmacology, University of Bern, Switzerland. robert.urbanczik@pki.unibe.ch
Wagner
C
C
D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005656:Fungal Proteins / Q000737:chemistry; D015966:Gene Expression Regulation, Fungal; D005800:Genes, Fungal; D005822:Genetic Vectors; D008660:Metabolism; D025941:Protein Interaction Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D012441:Saccharomyces cerevisiae / Q000502:physiology; D012984:Software; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*
D005656:Fungal Proteins