Network thermodynamics in the post-genomic era.
Network models have been used to study the underlying processes and principles of biological systems for decades, providing many insights into the complexity of life. Biological systems require a constant flow of free energy to drive these processes that operate away from thermodynamic equilibrium. With the advent of high-throughput omics technologies, more and more thermodynamic knowledge about the biological components, processes and their interactions are surfacing that we can integrate using large-scale biological network models. This allows us to ask many fundamental questions about these networks, such as, how far away from equilibrium must the reactions in a network be displaced in order to allow growth, or what are the possible thermodynamic objectives of the cell.
Soh
Keng Cher
KC
Laboratory of Computational Systems Biotechnology, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Hatzimanikatis
Vassily
V
D018407:Bacterial Physiological Phenomena; D002468:Cell Physiological Phenomena; D004734:Energy Metabolism; D053263:Gene Regulatory Networks; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D008954:Models, Biological; D049490:Systems Biology; D013816:Thermodynamics