Efficient Modeling of MS/MS Data for Metabolic Flux Analysis

Metabolic flux analysis (MFA) is a widely used method for quantifying intracellular metabolic fluxes. It works by feeding cells with isotopic labeled nutrients, measuring metabolite isotopic labeling, and computationally interpreting the measured labeling data to estimate flux. Tandem mass-spectrometry (MS/MS) has been shown to be useful for MFA, providing positional isotopic labeling data. Specifically, MS/MS enables the measurement of a metabolite tandem mass-isotopomer distribution, representing the abundance in which certain parent and product fragments of a metabolite have different number of labeled atoms. However, a major limitation in using MFA with MS/MS data is the lack of a computationally efficient method for simulating such isotopic labeling data. Here, we describe the tandemer approach for efficiently computing metabolite tandem mass-isotopomer distributions in a metabolic network, given an estimation of metabolic fluxes. This approach can be used by MFA to find optimal metabolic fluxes, whose induced metabolite labeling patterns match tandem mass-isotopomer distributions measured by MS/MS. The tandemer approach is applied to simulate MS/MS data in a small-scale metabolic network model of mammalian methionine metabolism and in a large-scale metabolic network model of E. coli. It is shown to significantly improve the running time by between two to three orders of magnitude compared to the state-of-the-art, cumomers approach. We expect the tandemer approach to promote broader usage of MS/MS technology in metabolic flux analysis.