ENZYME ORGANIZATION AND STABILITY OF METABOLIC PATHWAYS - A COMPARISON OF VARIOUS APPROACHES

The aim of this paper is to compare various methods for the quantifica tion of metabolic pathways dynamics. A Yates-Pardee metabolic pathway with enzyme organization, i.e. with spatial localization of the enzyme s in a specific cellular compartment, was,studied using: (i) the class ical 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 f ormalism or the BST formalism can greatly differ from transient soluti ons computed with the HMM equations. However, in the studied example, results remain qualitatively the same for the three formalisms. This s uggests that the study of the 'topology' of the system may give useful insights into the metabolic pathways dynamics.