(214f) Exploring the Diversity of Complex Metabolic Networks

Metabolism is one of the most complex reaction system. Nearly 20 years ago we teamed up with Professor Broadbelt to discover if it would be possible to distill the complexity of enzyme chemistry into a set of generalized reaction rules, using the concepts she has pioneered in chemical reaction engineering. We have shown this is possible and during the period of our collaboration we developed BNICE, the first mechanism generation method for enzyme catalyzed reactions. 20 years after we can describe almost all of the >70K known biochemical reactions with only 400 pairs of generalized enzyme reactions rules. During the development of this method we also realized the need for biochemical reaction thermodynamics and this led us to a work that revitalized and boosted the field of biochemical network thermodynamics. All these developments drove a large number of applications and new developments in the areas of metabolic engineering, environmental biotechnology, metabolomics, systems biology and biochemoinformatics. I will present the developments and applications of these methods over the years and I will discuss the challenges and opportunities for future developments.