Exercising Control when Control is Distributed

摘要

The major justification for studying flux control coefficients must be to understand how metabolic fluxes can be, or are, changed. Here, the theory of metabolic control analysis exposes a conundrum: it suggests that control is likely to be distributed over a number of pathway steps, and hence, because of the summation theorem, any individual flux control coefficient is likely to be less than one. Many of the experimental measurements of flux control coefficients have tended to confirm this expectation (Fell, 1992, 1997), with small values predominant.