title: Promise and reality in the expanding field of network interaction analysis: metabolic networks.
abstract: In the last few decades, metabolic networks revealed their capabilities as powerful tools to analyze the cellular metabolism. Many research fields (eg, metabolic engineering, diagnostic medicine, pharmacology, biochemistry, biology and physiology) improved the understanding of the cell combining experimental assays and metabolic network-based computations. This process led to the rise of the "systems biology" approach, where the theory meets experiments and where two complementary perspectives cooperate in the study of biological phenomena. Here, the reconstruction of metabolic networks is presented, along with established and new algorithms to improve the description of cellular metabolism. Then, advantages and limitations of modeling algorithms and network reconstruction are discussed.
authors.affiliation: PhD candidate in Biophysics. Former laboratory: Computational Systems Biochemistry Group, Charitè Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Susanna
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bazzani
keywords: -omics dataset integration; enzymatic perturbations; genome-scale models; metabolic adjustments; metabolic impairments; metabolic network; pathway simulation