Rational design of 13C-labeling experiments for metabolic flux analysis in mammalian cells

摘要

Background¹³C-Metabolic flux analysis (¹³C-MFA) is a standard technique to probe cellular metabolism and elucidate in vivo metabolic fluxes. ¹³C-Tracer selection is an important step in conducting ¹³C-MFA, however, current methods are restricted to trial-and-error approaches, which commonly focus on an arbitrary subset of the tracer design space. To systematically probe the complete tracer design space, especially for complex systems such as mammalian cells, there is a pressing need for new rational approaches to identify optimal tracers.