The free lunch of a scale-free metabolism

Abstract

In this work it is shown that scale free tails in metabolic flux distributions inferred from realistic large models can be simply an artefact due to reactions involved in thermodynamically unfeasible cycles, that are unbounded by physical constraints and able to perform work without expenditure of free energy. After correcting for thermodynamics, the metabolic space scales meaningfully with the physical limiting factors, acquiring in turn a richer multimodal structure potentially leading to symmetry breaking while optimizing for objective functions.