Learning from quantitative data to understand central carbon metabolism

Quantitative analysis of metabolism has been used to identify driver reactions occurring during cancer development and bottleneck reactions in the metabolic engineering of microorganisms. In this review, we compare the advantages and disadvantages of various metabolic analysis methods. We emphasize that metabolic flux analysis based on material balance is a critical method for quantitative investigations into cell metabolism. The absolute determination of metabolite concentration appears to be essential for evaluating the thermodynamic state of metabolism. Obtaining a precise read-out of regulatory mechanisms from the snapshot data remains challenging due to our insufficient knowledge of the control of metabolism.