Zita I. T. A. Soons, Eugénio C. Ferreira, Kiran R. Patil, Isabel Rocha

Identification of optimal genetic manipulation strategies for redirecting substrate uptake towards a desired product is a challenging task owing to the complexity of metabolic networks, esp. in terms of large number of routes leading to the desired product. Algorithms that can exploit the whole range of optimal and suboptimal routes for product formation while respecting the biological objective of the cell are therefore much needed. Towards addressing this need, we here introduce the notion of structural flux, which is derived from the enumeration of all pathways in the metabolic network in question and accounts for the contribution towards a given biological objective function. We show that the theoretically estimated structural fluxes are good predictors of experimentally measured intra-cellular fluxes in two model organisms, namely, Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. For a small number of fluxes for which the predictions were poor, the corresponding enzyme-coding transcripts were also found to be distinctly regulated, showing the ability of structural fluxes in capturing the underlying regulatory principles. Exploiting the observed correspondence between in vivo fluxes and structural fluxes, we propose an in silico metabolic engineering approach, iStruF, which enables the identification of gene deletion strategies that couple the cellular biological objective with the product flux while considering optimal as well as sub-optimal routes and their efficiency.