Metabolic Control Design: Implicatios and Applications

摘要

The introduction of metabolic control analysis by Kacser & Burns (1973) and Heinrich & Rapoport (1974) represented a substantial progress int he quantitative study of metabolism. The new framework had important consequences. Perhaps for the first time, it was rigorously shown that the reductionist approach of traditional enzymology was inadequate (or at least incomplete) to understand metabolic functioning. To fill this gap it put forward an integrated view where the patterns of responses naturally emerged from the interplay of the properties of the components and their interactiosn (Cornish-Bowden & Cardenas, 1990; Fell, 1997). The questions usually addressed by metabolic control analysis are of the type: how does metabolism respond under particular conditions? Or, if we construct a metabolic system with enzyme components of known properties, how would it respond? However, there are other questions that metabolic control analysis was not developed to answer For instance, how do we construct a metabolic system that shows a pre-established pattern of responses? How do the constraints operating during evolution shape metabolic responses? These other questions are not in the domain of analysis, they belong to that of design.