Metabolic flux analysis and metabolic engineering of microorganisms.

Recent advances in metabolic flux analysis including genome-scale constraints-based flux analysis and its applications in metabolic engineering are reviewed. Various computational aspects of constraints-based flux analysis including genome-scale stoichiometric models, additional constraints used for the improved accuracy, and several algorithms for identifying the target genes to be manipulated are described. Also, some of the successful applications of metabolic flux analysis in metabolic engineering are reviewed. Finally, we discuss the limitations that need to be overcome to make the results of genome-scale flux analysis more realistically represent the real cell metabolism.