Closed BenjaSanchez closed 6 years ago
It's unclear to me how you defined the chemical formulae of the pseudo metabolites. Could you show for instance why triglyceride
has chemical formula C3H2
?
@edkerk sure! Let's take tryglyceride (16:1-16:1-16:1)
: The molecular formula is C51H92O6
, and the corresponding SLIME rxn creates a backbone + 3 chains of palmitoleic acid C16H30O2
(note, not palmitoleate, which has one H less). Then I mass balance those formulas: C51H92O6 - 3*(C16H30O2) = C3H2
, to display clearly that a SLIME rxn is indeed "splitting" the lipid. You can see the code in addSLIMErxn.m. The alternative would be to include the radicals and make the formula C3H2R3
, or even C3H6R3
, which looks nicer based on the known structure for triglycerides but double accounts for 3 H's (already included in the acyl chains). Also those 2 approaches are "unbalanced" in the amount of radicals... Then again SLIME rxns are already unbalanced due to the stoich coeffs so maybe this is not an issue.
(could not find a pic for 16:1-16:1-16:1)
I would not try to balance the rxns as the stoichiometries would be long decimals, but any of the 3 aforementioned options would be fine by me, so let me know which one you think makes more sense and I can adapt the pipeline to that.
@BenjaSanchez thanks for the clear justification. I think it's important that combining the formulae of backbone + chain ideally yields the full formula (as you detailed C51H92O6 - 3*(C16H30O2) = C3H2
). I would suggest two options:
C3H2R3
-type formulae for backbones. It's not completely balanced, but the names of the backbones suggest that they represent a complete lipid species, and this could be captured by including R.C3H2
-type formulae for backbones, the split reactions are still fully balanced, and no confusion why these backbones have unconventional formulae@BenjaSanchez @edkerk I prefer the second option if standing at the point of testing unbalanced reaction and metabolites.
@feiranl @edkerk the word backbone
has been included in all corresponding metabolites in the latest commit. Let me know if there is anything else pending.
Main improvements in this PR:
This PR addresses #21 with a novel way for constraining lipid metabolism (see SysBioChalmers/SLIMEr):
I hereby confirm that I have:
devel
as a target branch (top left drop-down menu)