[1] His early work at Oxford Polytechnic focussed on haemoglobin where he developed more precise techniques for monitoring oxygen saturation[5] and the breakdown of 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate by Fe(III)-haemoglobin.
[6] At this time he also worked on the first modelling studies related to the functioning of high- and low-Km cyclic nucleotide phosphodiesterases on the regulation of adenosine 3',5'-cyclic monophosphate (cAMP)[7] From the early 1980s David Fell switched his research to systems biology and was one of the earliest systems biologists in the UK, with publications from 1979[8] onwards.
Given that his early work had a significant mathematical and computational component, he was ideally positioned to consider a more quantitative approach to studying the properties of cellular networks.
[3] In 1986 he published with his graduate student Rankin Small, one of the earliest flux-balance models where they used linear programming to examine the efficiency in the conversion of glucose into fat.
[13] Other than his textbook, which has been cited 1464 times (Sept, 2018), his top ten publications include:[14] two publications related to the evolutionary age of metabolism using small-world analysis, the definition of a pathway in terms of elementary modes, three reviews on metabolic control analysis including a republication[15] of the seminal work, Control of Flux by Kacser and Burns,[16] two research papers on metabolic control analysis, one of the earliest papers on the use of flux-balance analysis, one of the earliest papers that describes a model the MAPK pathway in EGF signalling, and well as the earliest paper that describes the whole genome-scale model of the plant Arabidopsis.