Fluxomics describes the various approaches that seek to determine the rates of metabolic reactions within a biological entity.
[1] While metabolomics can provide instantaneous information on the metabolites in a biological sample, metabolism is a dynamic process.
[6] Similar to genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome, the fluxome is defined as the complete set of metabolic fluxes in a cell.
[5] This is due to the fluxome resulting from the interactions of the metabolome, genome, transcriptome, proteome, post-translational modifications and the environment.
[11] Using an imaging technique such as mass spectrometry or nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy the level of incorporation of 13C into metabolites can be measured and with stoichiometry the metabolic fluxes can be estimated.
[12] On the more experimental side, metabolic flux analysis allows the empirical estimation of reaction rates by stable isotope labelling.
Such explorations are most informative when accompanied by empirical measurements of the system under study following actual perturbations, as is the case in metabolic control analysis.
[14][15][16][17][18][19][20] Although it can only be measured indirectly, metabolic flux is the critical link between genes, proteins and the observable phenotype.