Mechanistic pathway modeling for industrial biotechnology: challenging but worthwhile.

Mechanistic (also called kinetic) models quantitatively describe dynamic and steady states of biochemical pathways. They are based on network structure (stoichiometry), regulatory information (enzyme inhibitors and activators) and the corresponding reaction kinetics. Although this approach to understand and predict the behavior of biochemical networks has now been in use for almost half a century, its experimental foundation has dramatically changed in the data-rich age of systems biology. Large mechanistic models, ranging up to the genome scale, are now being built and lots of data are available to validate and test them. From the broad scope of possible modeling applications, this survey focuses on the recent developments and central problems of metabolic network modeling in the field of bioprocess development for industrial biotechnology.