Stoichiometric analysis of self-maintaining metabolisms.

This paper presents an extension of stoichiometric analysis in systems where the catalytic compounds (enzymes) are also intermediates of the metabolic network (dual property), so they are produced and degraded by the reaction network itself. To take this property into account, we introduce the definition of enzyme-maintaining mode, a set of reactions that produces its own catalyst and can operate at stationary state. Moreover, an enzyme-maintaining mode is defined as elementary with respect to a given reaction if the removal of any of the remaining reactions causes the cessation of any steady state flux through this reference reaction. These concepts are applied to determine the network structure of a simple self-maintaining system.