A multi-organ maize metabolic model connects temperature stress with energy production and reducing power generation.

Climate change has adversely affected maize productivity. Thereby, a holistic understanding of metabolic crosstalk among its organs is important to address this issue. Thus, we reconstructed the first multi-organ maize metabolic model, ZMA6517, and contextualized it with heat and cold stress transcriptomics data using expression distributed reaction flux measurement (EXTREAM) algorithm.

Standardizing biomass reactions and ensuring complete mass balance in genome-scale metabolic models.

Motivation: In a genome-scale metabolic model, the biomass produced is defined to have a molecular weight (MW) of 1 g mmol-1. This is critical for correctly predicting growth yields, contrasting multiple models and more importantly modeling microbial communities. However, the standard is rarely verified in the current practice and the chemical formulae of biomass components such as proteins, nucleic acids and lipids are often represented by undefined side groups (e.