Consistency, feasibility and multiplicity of fluxes in metabolic pathways

A simple test to check the consistency of large scale stoichiometric matrices in metabolic pathways is presented. Once the flux obtained is consistent, a systematic method is developed to examine the structure of multiple solutions in the metabolic network. Many of these multiple solutions are thermodynamically infeasible, hence a computational method is developed which is computationally intensive when we have to generate feasible multiple solutions. Changing certain fluxes, for example the glucose intake affects the growth of the cell or knocking out a particular gene can affect other fluxes, to explain such features we examine the sensitivity of fluxes to change in controllable fluxes. This technique has been applied to the metabolic network of Escherichia coli.