Thermodynamic constraints for identifying elementary flux modes

Metabolic pathway analysis is a key method to study metabolism and the elementary flux modes (EFMs) is one major concept allowing one to analyze the network in terms of minimal pathways. Their practical use has been hampered by the combinatorial explosion of their number in large systems. The EFMs give the possible pathways at steady state, but the real pathways are limited by biological constraints. In this review, we display three different methods that integrate thermodynamic constraints in terms of Gibbs free energy in the EFMs computation.