It can be shown that any achievable flux distribution can be expressed as a combination of such elementary routes.
This second condition ensures that the flux distribution is not decomposable into a combination of smaller elementary routes.
Reactions that always appear jointly in elementary routes are bound to operate together (Pfeiffer et al., 1999).
These elementary routes are flux distributions that (1) respect all assumed constraints, including steady state and irreversibility, and (2) are elementary in the sense that they are composed of a minimal set of active reactions.
Finally, metabolic dependencies between reactions which are stronger than those determined only by analyzing the correlation of fluxes in sampled distributions can be deduced from knowing elementary routes.
Conversely, the relative importance of reactions in metabolism was scored using elementary routes, reactions involved in many routes being likely to be key players in metabolism (Stelling et al., 2002).
The main obstacle in metabolic pathway analysis is the size and complexity of the metabolic models, as the number of elementary routes dramatically increases with the size of the model (Yeung et al., 2007).
This property, together with the fact that the set of elementary routes is unique, independently of the method used to compute it (Klamt & Stelling, 2003), has inspired numerous applications.
Puerto Rico's Monica Puig springs what must count as the first bone-fide upset of Wimbledon 2013, lashing 38 winners en-route to an elementary 6-3, 6-2 victory.
ERIK KAEYER confidently strode through the mud here en route to the site of an elementary school that was under construction.
WHAT -- 2-bedroom bungalow HOW MUCH -- $115,000 Built in 1937, this 837-square-foot bungalow is on a small city lot in the East Madison area, three blocks from an elementary school and one block from a bus route.
