Utilizing gene regulatory information to speed up the calculation of elementary flux modes

Abstract

Despite the significant progress made in recent years, the computation of the complete set of elementary flux modes of large or even genome-scale metabolic networks is still impossible. We introduce a novel approach to speed up the calculation of elementary flux modes by including transcriptional regulatory information into the analysis of metabolic network. Taking into account gene regulation dramatically reduces the solution space and allows the presented algorithm to constantly eliminate biologically infeasible modes at an early stage of the computation procedure. Thereby, the computational costs, such as runtime, memory usage and disk space are considerably reduced. Consequently, using the presented mode elimination algorithm pushes the size of metabolic networks that can be studied by elementary flux modes to new limits.