In the past, construction of quantitative metabolic flux
models has been an extremely time-consuming process, requiring 12-18 months to
create a bacterial model. One of our
main goals in designing the MetaFlux module for creating metabolic models
within Pathway Tools has been to speed up this process by automating as many of
its steps as possible, and by providing software power tools for debugging
metabolic models (a viewpoint that was put forward by our colleague Jeremy
Zucker). We can now create metabolic
models using MetaFlux in approximately 1 month.
This blog surveys our recommended procedure for creating
metabolic models from sequenced genomes using Pathway Tools.
