Comparative Metabolic Flux Analysis by MetaFluxNet
Dong-Yup Lee1, Hongsoek Yun2, Sang-Yup Lee and Sunwon Park
1dylee@pse.kaist.ac.kr, KAIST; 2hsyun@pse.kaist.ac.kr, KAIST
MetaFluxNet is a program package for managing information on the metabolic reaction network and for quantitatively analyzing metabolic fluxes in an interactive and customized way. It allows users to investigate the influences of gene addition or deletion, and of varying cultivation conditions on the metabolic flux distribution. This makes it possible to understand the metabolic and physiological changes of cell under different conditions, and consequently to design new metabolic engineering strategies to achieve desired goals. Furthermore, the results of comparative metabolic flux analysis (MFA) are displayed in one window, where specified measurements and gene modification (addition or deletion) can be represented by ‘measured’ and ‘added or deleted’, respectively, in the state field of fluxes, while the states of non-measured metabolic fluxes are categorized by ‘calculated’ and ‘bound’. Using this feature of MetaFluxNet, one can design and evaluate various metabolically engineered in silico strains by relaxing the capacity range of bound fluxes and/or by changing the genotypes. MetaFluxNet is available at http://mbel.kaist.ac.kr.