I’m happy to announce that our work on analysis of metabolic flux ratios in human cells is now published in Metabolic Engineering. A flux ratio is the relative amount of metabolic flux that one reaction contributes to a metabolite pool — for example, the fraction of citrate that is derived from reductive carboxylation by isocitrate dehydrogenase. In cases where it is difficult to do absolute quantification of fluxes experimentally (particularly in vivo models), these are important parameters to estimate, and in this paper, we study several models of metabolic systems and try to get a handle on which flux ratios can be accurately estimated.

This is still a work in progress — we don’t know exactly how to choose parameters to get the optimal amount of information out of an experiment, and there is much to be done in testing these methods on a variety of experimental systems — but I think it’s a good step along the way. Enjoy!  :-)