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Fast computation of minimal elementary decompositions of metabolic flux vectors

✍ Scribed by Raphael M. Jungers; Francisca Zamorano; Vincent D. Blondel; Alain Vande Wouwer; Georges Bastin


Publisher
Elsevier Science
Year
2011
Tongue
English
Weight
446 KB
Volume
47
Category
Article
ISSN
0005-1098

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✦ Synopsis


The concept of elementary flux vector is valuable in a number of applications of metabolic engineering. For instance, in metabolic flux analysis, each admissible flux vector can be expressed as a non-negative linear combination of a small number of elementary flux vectors. However a critical issue concerns the total number of elementary flux vectors which may be huge because it combinatorially increases with the size of the metabolic network. In this paper we present a fast algorithm that randomly computes a decomposition of admissible flux vectors in a minimal number of elementary flux vectors without explicitly enumerating all of them.