Plant pathogenic pseudomonads such as Pseudomonas syringae colonize plant surfaces and tissues and have been reported to be nutritionally specialized relative to nonpathogenic pseudomonads. We performed comparative analyses of metabolic networks reconstructed from genome sequence data in order to investigate the hypothesis that P. syringae has evolved to be metabolically specialized for a plant...

The availability of whole-cell-level metabolic networks of high quality has made it possible to develop a predictive understanding of bacterial metabolism. Using the optimization framework of flux balance analysis, I investigate the metabolic response and activity patterns to variations in the availability of nutrient and chemical factors such as oxygen and ammonia by simulating 30,000 random c...

MOTIVATION A metabolic graph represents the connectivity patterns of a metabolic system, and provides a powerful framework within which the organization of metabolic reactions can be analyzed and elucidated. A common practice is to prune (i.e. remove nodes and edges) the metabolic graph prior to any analysis in order to eliminate confounding signals from the representation. Currently, this prun...

Cellular metabolites are moieties defined by their specific binding constants to H+, Mg2+, and K+ or anions without ligands. As a consequence, every biochemical reaction in the cytoplasm has an associated proton stoichiometry that is generally noninteger- and pH-dependent. Therefore, with metabolic flux, pH is altered in a medium with finite buffer capacity. Apparent equilibrium constants and m...

UNLABELLED Constraint-based models of metabolic networks are typically underdetermined, because they contain more reactions than metabolites. Therefore the solutions to this system do not consist of unique flux rates for each reaction, but rather a space of possible flux rates. By uniformly sampling this space, an estimated probability distribution for each reaction's flux in the network can be...

The optimization of biological systems, which is a branch of metabolic engineering, has generated a lot of industrial and academic interest for a long time. In the last decade, metabolic engineering approaches based on mathematical optimizations have been used extensively for the analysis and manipulation of metabolic networks. In practical optimization of metabolic reaction networks, designers...

We have developed a computational method for determining the maximum theoretical production capability of a metabolic network and for identifying corresponding metabolic engineering strategies. The method relies on generating feasible chemical reactions and predicting the effect of their insertion into a host metabolic network. A chemical reaction which optimizes a given objective, such as grow...

The human mitochondrial metabolic network was recently reconstructed based on proteomic and biochemical data. Linear programming and uniform random sampling were applied herein to identify candidate steady states of the metabolic network that were consistent with the imposed physico-chemical constraints and available experimental data. The activity of the mitochondrion was studied under four me...

The human mitochondrial metabolic network was recently reconstructed based on proteomic and biochemical data. Linear programming and uniform random sampling were applied herein to identify candidate steady states of the metabolic network that were consistent with the imposed physico-chemical constraints and available experimental data. The activity of the mitochondrion was studied under four me...

Acinetobacter baumannii has emerged as a new clinical threat to human health, particularly to ill patients in the hospital environment. Current lack of effective clinical solutions to treat this pathogen urges us to carry out systems-level studies that could contribute to the development of an effective therapy. Here we report the development of a strategy for identifying drug targets by combin...