Mixed-Integer Optimization for Loopless Flux Distributions in Metabolic Networks

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Hauptverfasser: Troppens, Hannah, Besançon, Mathieu, Wilken, St. Elmo, Pokutta, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Troppens, Hannah
Besançon, Mathieu
Wilken, St. Elmo
Pokutta, Sebastian
author_facet Troppens, Hannah
Besançon, Mathieu
Wilken, St. Elmo
Pokutta, Sebastian
contents Constraint-based metabolic models can be used to investigate the intracellular physiology of microorganisms. These models couple genes to reactions, and typically seek to predict metabolite fluxes that optimize some biologically important metric. Classical techniques, like Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), formulate the metabolism of a microbe as an optimization problem where growth rate is maximized. While FBA has found widespread use, it often leads to thermodynamically infeasible solutions that contain internal cycles (loops). To address this shortcoming, Loopless-Flux Balance Analysis (ll-FBA) seeks to predict flux distributions that do not contain these loops. ll-FBA is a disjunctive program, usually reformulated as a mixed-integer program, and is challenging to solve for biological models that often contain thousands of reactions and metabolites. In this paper, we compare various reformulations of ll-FBA and different solution approaches. Overall, the combinatorial Benders' decomposition is the most promising of the tested approaches with which we could solve most instances. However, the model size and numerical instability pose a challenge to the combinatorial Benders' method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_00807
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mixed-Integer Optimization for Loopless Flux Distributions in Metabolic Networks
Troppens, Hannah
Besançon, Mathieu
Wilken, St. Elmo
Pokutta, Sebastian
Optimization and Control
Constraint-based metabolic models can be used to investigate the intracellular physiology of microorganisms. These models couple genes to reactions, and typically seek to predict metabolite fluxes that optimize some biologically important metric. Classical techniques, like Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), formulate the metabolism of a microbe as an optimization problem where growth rate is maximized. While FBA has found widespread use, it often leads to thermodynamically infeasible solutions that contain internal cycles (loops). To address this shortcoming, Loopless-Flux Balance Analysis (ll-FBA) seeks to predict flux distributions that do not contain these loops. ll-FBA is a disjunctive program, usually reformulated as a mixed-integer program, and is challenging to solve for biological models that often contain thousands of reactions and metabolites. In this paper, we compare various reformulations of ll-FBA and different solution approaches. Overall, the combinatorial Benders' decomposition is the most promising of the tested approaches with which we could solve most instances. However, the model size and numerical instability pose a challenge to the combinatorial Benders' method.
title Mixed-Integer Optimization for Loopless Flux Distributions in Metabolic Networks
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00807