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Directionality is an inherent property of biochemical networks

Feng Yang·Feng Qi·Daniel A. Beard
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Abstract

Thermodynamic constraints on reactions directions are inherent in the structure of a given biochemical network. However, concrete procedures for determining feasible reaction directions for large-scale metabolic networks are not well established. This work introduces a systematic approach to compute reaction directions, which are constrained by mass balance and thermodynamics, for genome-scale networks. In addition, it is shown that the nonconvex solution space constrained by physicochemical constraints can be approximated by a set of linearized subspaces in which mass and thermodynamic balance are guaranteed. The developed methodology can be used to {\it ab initio} predict reaction directions of genome-scale networks based solely on the network stoichoimetry.

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Feng Yang, Feng Qi, Daniel A. Beard. 2007-02-01. Directionality is an inherent property of biochemical networks. https://arxiv.org/abs/q-bio/0701004

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