Enzyme organization and stability of metabolic pathways: A comparison of various approaches

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare various methods for the quantification of metabolic pathways dynamics. A Yates-Pardee metabolic pathway with enzyme organization, i.e. with spatial localization of the enzymes in a specific cellular compartment, was studied using: (i) the classical Henri-Michaelis-Menten (HMM) equations, (ii) linearization of the HMM equations in the vicinity of a steady state (linearized formalism), and (iii) Biochemical Systems Theory formalism (BST formalism). It is shown that transient solutions computed via either the linearized formalism or the BST formalism can greatly differ from transient solutions computed with the HMM equations. However, in the studied example, results remain qualitatively the same for the three formalisms. This suggests that the study of the ‘topology’ of the system may give useful insights into the metabolic pathways dynamics.