Sensitivity analysis of a pathway with respect to fast and small temperature change

Abstract

Temperature affects all enzymes simultaneously in a metabolic system. The enzyme concentration in a biochemical system can be considered as invariant under fast and small temperature change. Therefore, the total sensitivity of a steady state flux through a pathway with respect to the temperature can be expressed as: the apparent activation energy of a steady state pathway flux equals the sum of weighted activation energies of the individual reactions contributing to the flux, where the weighting factors are the flux control coefficients of these reactions in the context of the network. Correspondingly, since the elasticity of any enzyme with respect to temperature is always nonzero, only the reactions with a nonzero flux control coefficient contribute accordingly to the temperature sensitivity of the pathway.