Chapter 3 - Analysis and modeling tools of metabolic flux

Abstract

Metabolic engineering of microorganisms mainly involves the design, construction, and optimization of microbial metabolic pathways, which is aimed to increase the yield of target products. As the core of metabolic engineering, metabolic flux is one of the most important determinants of cell physiology in metabolic engineering. In the past 25 years, various computational, analytical, and experimental methods have been developed for metabolic flux analysis. Two main methods are 13C-labeling and genome-scale metabolic flux analysis. This chapter provides a brief introduction workflow and related progress of the 13C-labeled metabolic flux analysis, mainly introduce the genome-scale metabolic model, including the construction methods and tools of the genome-scale metabolic model, the construction history of four typical industrial microbial metabolism models, and the related applications of metabolic models in metabolic engineering.