Unlocking Elementary Conversion Modes: ecmtool Unveils All Capabilities of Metabolic Networks.

ABSTRACT: The metabolic capabilities of cells determine their biotechnological potential, fitness in ecosystems, pathogenic threat levels, and function in multicellular organisms. Their comprehensive experimental characterization is generally not feasible, particularly for unculturable organisms. In principle, the full range of metabolic capabilities can be computed from an organism's annotated genome using metabolic network reconstruction. However, current computational methods cannot deal with genome-scale metabolic networks. Part of the problem is that these methods aim to enumerate all metabolic pathways, while computation of all (elementally balanced) conversions between nutrients and products would suffice. Indeed, the elementary conversion modes (ECMs, defined by Urbanczik and Wagner) capture

SUBMITTER: Clement TJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7815953 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature