The denser, but less organized metabolism of prokarya is likely a consequence of higher evolutionary pressures in these species, whose metabolic organization needs to adapt to a greater variety of environments than that of eukarya.
Based on a statistical analysis applied to the hierarchical time scales and modal library, next section is devoted to show that one can tackle two interesting issues: to uncover global properties in dynamic metabolic networks and to survey the proper metabolic organization required to induce adequate physiological functions.
The advent of high-throughput technologies has fostered the genome scale analysis for bacterial nitrogen fixation, and the output data constitute valuable material in deciphering their metabolic organization at different biological layers [ 5, 6].
Continuing with our analysis, the modal library was statistically analyzed to survey the metabolic organization by which the cells respond to changes in kinetic parameters.
By selecting taxa representative of different lineages or lifestyles and using a comprehensive set of descriptors of the structure and complexity of their metabolic networks, one can highlight both qualitative and quantitative differences in the metabolic organization of species subject to distinct evolutionary paths or environmental constraints.
This practical utility consequently fueled the reconstruction of over 100 GEMs representing the metabolic organization of various organisms across all three domains of life [ 4, 5].
In a study typical of a systems biology approach, Fong & Palsson (2004) demonstrated that consistency between metabolic organization and phenotype during adaptive evolution led to large increases in growth rate for gene-deletion strains, while the underlying characteristics of the mutants obtained independently differed widely.
One of the major implications of the present study was to shed light for the first time on the metabolic organization of the oocyst/sporozoite, unveiling stage-specific differences with respect to the extensively studied tachyzoite.
An additional goal was to devise a visual representation of silkworm metabolic organization during a major developmental transformation by analyzing changes in 13C intensities of metabolites in a pathway.
This observation also lends support to the usefulness of FBA in probing metabolic organization.
