Fast computation of minimal elementary decompositions of metabolic flux vectors

The concept of elementary flux vector is valuable in a number of applications of metabolic engineering. For instance, in metabolic flux analysis, each admissible flux vector can be expressed as a non-negative linear combination of a small number of elementary flux vectors. However a critical issue concerns the total number of elementary flux vectors which may be huge because it combinatorially increases with the size of the metabolic network. In this paper we present a fast algorithm that randomly computes a decomposition of admissible flux vectors in a minimal number of elementary flux modes without explicitly enumerating all of them. The method is illustrated with an experimental case-study on CHO cells where the network has 65329 elementary flux vectors while the admissible flux distributions are expressed as a combination of 22 elementary vectors only.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AUTOMATICA
• Authors: Raphaël M. Jungers, Francisca Zamorano, Vincent D. Blondel, Alain Vande Wouwer, Georges Bastin
• Keywords: AUTOMATICA 2011, Cho Cells, Hardware, Linear Combination, Metabolic Engineering