(439a) From Reaction Engineering to Systems Biology

Cellular functions rely on complex reaction networks, that typically involve hundreds if not thousands of reactions. Topologically these biochemical reaction networks are different from chemical reaction networks in that they have co-factors that participate in many reactions and thus they are highly interconnected. We will describe the reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic reaction networks, how to represent them mathematically, how to compute their likely flux states, and how such computations can be used to drive biological discovery and design.