Section: New Results

Identification of all the minimal precursor sets for a given set of targets

Once the metabolic network of an organism has been defined, the question of how are produced the essential metabolites for the organism arises. In particular, it is important to know which are the metabolites that the organism needs to obtain from its environment to produce those essential metabolites. In the case of symbiosis, this environment could be the host, and determining such metabolites one way of exploring the dialog that is established between different organisms that entertain a close and often long term relation. We call such metabolites that must be obtained from the environment precursors. We had already in 2008 established the complexity of the problem of, given a network and a set of targets of interest, enumerating all minimal sets of precursors enabling to produce the targets, and given one first algorithm. The algorithm has since been much improved (journal paper submitted). The algorithm has been developed into a software called Pitufo (see the Softwares Section). This work was done in collaboration with A. Marchetti-Spaccamela, L. Stougie, and L. Cottret.