A Method for Estimating Metabolic Fluxes from Incomplete Isotopomer Information
Metabolic flux estimation--the problem of finding out the rates of reactions in metabolic pathways--is an important problem area in the study of metabolism. The most accurate technique for this task today is the use of isotopic tracer experiments, where a mixture of differently isotope-labeled substrates is fed to a cell culture and the propagation of the labels is observed from the products and intermediate metabolites, where possible. We present a generic methodology for solving the fluxes of a metabolic network in a steady state. The method differs from most previous approaches by not making prior assumptions about the topology of the metabolic network. Also, only very mild assumptions are made about the available measurement data, for example, both positional enrichment and mass isotopomer data can be used.