Review - Kinetic models of metabolism
People from the Sauer group wrote a review about computational models of metabolism. The focus was on models that include reaction kinetics in order to simulate dynamics of metabolic networks. The finding is that such models experience a paradigm shift away from fitting parameters towards identifying key regulatory interactions.
Kinetic models are crucial to quantitatively understand and predict how functional behavior emerges from dynamic concentration changes of cellular components. The current challenge is on resolving uncertainties about parameter values of reaction kinetics. Additionally, there are also major structural uncertainties due to unknown molecular interactions and only putatively assigned regulatory functions. What if one or few key regulators of biochemical reactions are missing in a metabolic model? By reviewing current advances in building kinetic models of metabolism, we found that such models experience a paradigm shift away from fitting parameters towards identifying key regulatory interactions.
Reference:
Link H, Christodoulou D, Sauer U. Advancing metabolic models with kinetic information. Curr Opin Biotechnol. 2014 Feb 13;29C:8-14. external page DOI