Inclusion of maintenance energy improves the intracellular flux predictions of CHO

Parsimonious flux balance analysis (pFBA) was used to predict intracellular fluxes of Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cells using the genome-scale metabolic model of CHO iCHO1766. The pFBA predictions were compared to fluxes measured by 13C metabolic flux analysis (in 20 datasets from 6 publications), revealing that the predicted fluxes were largely underestimated. Computationally estimated maintenance energy (mATP) improved the predictions and was consistent with experimentally measured mATP. The folder experimental_mATP contains data from continuous fermentations + scripts to calculate metabolite exchange rates, estimate mATP with pFBA and visualise the results. The folder pFBA_vs_13C contains 13C flux data from literature + scripts to run pFBA simulations (using the GSMM of CHO), compare pFBA-predicted and 13C fluxes, perform statistical analysis, computationally estimate mATP and visualise the results. More details can be found in read_me.txt files.