The free lunch of a scale-free metabolism
arXiv:1703.00853 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.95.062419
Abstract
In this work it is shown that scale free tails in metabolic flux distributions inferred from realistic large scale models can be simply an artefact due to reactions involved in thermodynamically unfeasible cycles, that are unbounded by physical constraints and would be able to perform work without expenditure of free energy. After correcting for thermodynamics, the metabolic space scales meaningfully with the physical limiting factors, acquiring in turn a richer multimodal structure potentially leading to symmetry breaking while optimizing for objective functions.
Comments are welcome
References in corpus (5)
- Dynamical synapses causing self-organized criticality in neural networks
- Irreversible thermodynamics of open chemical networks I: Emergent cycles and broken conservation laws
- An analytic approximation of the feasible space of metabolic networks
- A scalable algorithm to explore the Gibbs energy landscape of genome-scale metabolic networks
- Inferring metabolic phenotypes from the exometabolome through a thermodynamic variational principle