Characterizing the capabilities, key dependencies, and response to perturbations of genome-scale metabolic networks is a basic problem with important applications. A key question concerns the identification of the potentially
most harmful reaction knockouts. The integration of combinatorial methods with sampling techniques to explore the space of viable flux states may provide crucial insights on this issue. We assess the replaceability of every metabolic conversion in the human red blood cell by enumerating the alternative paths from substrate to product, obtaining a complete map of
he potential damage of single enzymopathies. Sampling the space of optimal steady state fluxes in the healthy and in the mutated cell reveals both correlations and complementarity between topologic and dynamical aspects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.