SCAMP: a general-purpose simulator and metabolic control analysis program.

SCAMP is a general-purpose simulator of metabolic and chemical networks. The program is written in C and is portable to all computer systems that support an ANSI C compiler. SCAMP accepts metabolic models described in a biochemical language, and this enables novice as well as experienced users rapidly to build and simulate metabolic systems. The language is sufficiently flexible to enable other types of model to be built, e.g. chemostat or ecological models. The language offers many facilities, including: the ability to describe metabolic pathways of any structure and possessing any kinetics using normal chemical notation; optionally build models directly from the differential equations; differing compartment volumes; access to flux, concentration and rate of change information; detection of conserved cycles; access to all coefficients and elasticities of metabolic control analysis; user-defined forcing functions at the model boundaries; user-defined monitoring functions; user-configurable output of any quantity. From the model description SCAMP can either generate C code for later compilation to produce fast executable stand-alone models or run-time code for input to a run-time interpreter for immediate execution. The simulator also incorporates an inbuilt symbolic differentiator for evaluating the Jacobian and elasticity matrices.