Environmental flexibility does not explain metabolic robustness.

ABSTRACT: Cells show remarkable resilience against genetic and environmental perturbations. However, its evolutionary origin remains obscure. In order to leverage methods of systems biology for examining cellular robustness, a computationally accessible way of quantification is needed. Here, we present an unbiased metric of structural robustness in genome-scale metabolic models based on concepts prevalent in reliability engineering and fault analysis. The probability of failure (PoF) is defined as the (weighted) portion of all possible combinations of loss-of-function mutations that disable network functionality. It can be exactly determined if all essential reactions, synthetic lethal pairs of reactions, synthetic lethal triplets of reactions etc. are known. In theory, these minimal cut sets (MCSs)

SUBMITTER: Libiseller-Egger J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7695710 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature