Sam Hirniak

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  Elementary flux mode analysis of intracellular networks
  Sam Hirniak

  An understanding of cellular metabolism is crucial to a wide range of biotechnology and health-related activity, such as biofuel production and drug design. Unfortunately, the large scale of whole-genome metabolic networks means that some analytic tools, such as elementary flux mode analysis cannot be applied. Using a recently developed reduction method, we are able to reduce large metabolic models to more manageable, steady state equivalent networks. This reduction minimizes the number of elementary flux modes and hence facilitates flux mode analysis. In addition, we are addressing links between elementary flux mode analyses and signaling pathways. This involves generating a stoichiometric network with the same dynamics as a given signaling network, thus allowing computational tools such as elementary flux mode analysis to be applied in a new context.