Gene Knockout Study in Reduced Kidney Metabolic Network

As human metabolic network models become available, medical and pharmaceutical applications of these models are becoming feasible nowadays, and thus reconstruction and analysis of genome-scale models for human tissue-specific metabolism is becoming an excellent starting effort into the systems medicine era. Due to its significance for human physiology, a kidney metabolic model is studied with flux balance analysis in the present paper. The reduced metabolic model of human kidney used in the paper contains 276 genes, 340 metabolites and 443 metabolic reactions. We then investigated the optimal flux distributions and single/double gene deletion simulation of the model based on flux balance analysis.