The dawn of a new era of metabolic systems analysis

Novel high-throughput techniques are capable of producing dense time series of many simultaneous in vivo measurements of the expression of genes, concentrations of metabolites, the prevalence and activation states of proteins, and of other biomarkers characterizing the physiological state of a cell or organism. These data contain enormous information, much of which, however, is not explicit but must be extracted with mathematical and computational means. The magnitude of high-throughput data generation and the potential and demands that these data entail will dramatically affect strategies for modeling, analyzing, and optimizing pathways and usher in a new era of metabolic systems analysis.