Experimental evidence suggests the existence of evolutionary conserved global operation principles governing microbial metabolism

The search for optimization principles in microbial metabolism, such as biomass or ATP yields or growth rate optimization, has attracted substantial research efforts in the recent years. Here we use the results of C13 labeling experiments together with genome scale metabolic networks of S cerevisiae and E coli in order to assess if there are relationships between systemic variables that are present in both organisms. Strong correlations between the total flux per unit of substrate and the ATP turnover rate per unit of substrate and between the growth rate divided by the total flux and the total flux per unit of substrate were observed for both organisms. We also observed that the common assumption of biomass yield optimization is not consistent with the experiments.