Prediction of positional isotopomers of the citric acid cycle: the syntactic approach.

We propose a syntactic approach to modeling of biochemical fluxes that combines a rule-based description of atomic transfer in chemical reactions with a structurally oriented, stochastic model of chemical reaction kinetics. This approach avoids the use of differential equations to describe the production and disappearance of each molecule. The computer simulation predicts the changes over time in the abundance of each positional isotopomer of every metabolic intermediate in the citric acid cycle of heart cells, subsequent to administration of [2-13C]acetate (including natural abundance of 13C). (Positional isotopomers are isomers that differ in the positions of isotopes within the molecule.) The 32 positional isotopomers of glutamate fell into four groups with similar intragroup dynamics but with very different amplitudes. From the relative abundance of each isotopomer of glutamate, we calculate the relative area of multiplets of the nuclear magnetic resonance spectrum.