The Regulation of Cellular Systems

Rating:
Summary: Metabolic regulation for the mathematically confident
Review: This book from Reinhart Heinrich and Stefan Schuster is mathematically fairly advanced -- a book for the readers of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology. It covers the foundations of control analysis in matrix algebra rigorously, but without getting lost in the details. The authors have a well deserved reputation for their contributions to the mathematical aspects of the subject, but they do not allow this to dominate their presentation, and they do not lose sight of the biology.

The two authors have an extensive and thorough knowledge of the whole field, and they cover all of the topics one would expect to see, with abundant references, including oscillations and time hierarchies as well as the central theme of metabolic control analysis of the steady state, which occupies the middle third of the book. Recognizing that enzymes are the fundamental building blocks of metabolic systems, they devote appropriate space at the beginning to a discussion of the essential characteristics of biochemical reactions, their kinetics and stoicheiometry. They return to these aspects at the end in the course of a valuable discussion of optimization principles in enzymology and metabolism. Here they examine such questions as whether metabolic pathways came to take their present forms haphazardly, or whether they satisfy identifiable non-arbitrary rules of optimality. It is now widely accepted that the kinetic properties of individual enzymes are in some sense optimal (a topic also discussed in the book), but fewer are ready to accept that the whole stoicheiometric organization of metabolic pathways has also been subject to natural selection.

For general readers, it would be a major advance if books like this one could help to overthrow the ideas of rate-limiting steps that have bedevilled the biochemical conception of metabolism for so long, preventing biotechnology from realizing many of the objectives that were promised when genetic engineering first became possible. For specialists already concerned with the kinetic behaviour of multi-enzyme systems, this is a book they need to have.