Erroneous energy-generating cycles in published genome scale metabolic networks: Identification and removal.

Energy metabolism is central to cellular biology. Thus, genome-scale models of heterotrophic unicellular species must account appropriately for the utilization of external nutrients to synthesize energy metabolites such as ATP. However, metabolic models designed for flux-balance analysis (FBA) may contain thermodynamically impossible energy-generating cycles: without nutrient consumption, these models are still capable of charging energy metabolites (such as ADP→ATP or NADP+→NADPH).

Sybil--efficient constraint-based modelling in R.

Background: Constraint-based analyses of metabolic networks are widely used to simulate the properties of genome-scale metabolic networks. Publicly available implementations tend to be slow, impeding large scale analyses such as the genome-wide computation of pairwise gene knock-outs, or the automated search for model improvements. Furthermore, available implementations cannot easily be extended or adapted by users.