Modeling the Glycolysis: An Inverse Problem Approach

We show in this paper that the metabolic chain can be supposed a potential-Hamiltonian system in which the dynamical flow can be shared between gradient dissipative and periodic conservative parts. If the chain is branched and if we know the fluxes at the extremities of each branch we can deduce information about the internal kinetics (e.g. place of allosteric and Michaelian step with respect to those of branching paths, cooperatively) from minimal additional measurements inside the black box constituted by the system. We will treat as example the glycolysis with the pentose pathway whose fluxes measurements are done at the pyruvate and pentose levels.