Double and multiple knockout simulations for genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions.

Background: Constraint-based modeling of genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions has become a widely used approach in computational biology. Flux coupling analysis is a constraint-based method that analyses the impact of single reaction knockouts on other reactions in the network.

Results: We present an extension of flux coupling analysis for double and multiple gene or reaction knockouts, and develop corresponding algorithms for an in silico simulation.