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We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.

MiS Preprint
20/2009

Conservation of high-flux backbone in alternate optimal and near-optimal flux distributions of metabolic networks

Areejit Samal

Abstract

Constraint-based flux balance analysis (FBA) has proven successful in predicting the flux distribution of metabolic networks in diverse environmental conditions. FBA finds one of the alternate optimal solutions that maximizes the biomass production rate. Almaas {\it et al} have shown that, for a given medium, it is possible to associate with most metabolites two reactions which maximally produce and consume a given metabolite, respectively. This observation led to the concept of high flux backbone (HFB) in metabolic networks. In previous work, the HFB was computed using a particular optima obtained from FBA. In this paper, we investigate the conservation of HFB of a particular solution across different alternate optima and near-optima in metabolic networks of {\it E. coli} and {\it S. cerevisiae}. Using flux variability analysis (FVA), we propose a method to determine reactions that are guaranteed to be in HFB regardless of alternate solutions. We find that the HFB of a particular optima is largely conserved across alternate optima in {\it E. coli}, while it is only moderately conserved in {\it S. cerevisiae}. However, the HFB of a particular near-optima shows a large variation across alternate near-optima in both organisms. We show that the conserved set of reactions in HFB across alternate near-optima has a large overlap with essential reactions for growth and reactions which are both uniquely consuming (UC) and uniquely producing (UP). Our findings suggest that the structure of the metabolic network admits a high degree of redundancy and plasticity within near-optimal flow patterns for a given medium enhancing system robustness.

Received:
Apr 3, 2009
Published:
Apr 7, 2009
PACS:
87.18.Vf, 87.18.-h, 87.19.lw, 87.55.de, 82.39.R
Keywords:
Complex Network, Flux balance analysis, Alternate optima and near-optima, Flux variability analysis, Flux plasticity

Related publications

inJournal
2008 Journal Open Access
Areejit Samal

Conservation of high-flux backbone in alternate optimal and near-optimal flux distributions of metabolic networks

In: Systems and synthetic biology, 2 (2008) 3/4, pp. 83-93