Flux Control Analysis: Basic Principles and Industrial Applications

Industrial microbiologists, biochemists, and engineers are generally, but not entirely, of the view that flux through a given pathway is usually limited by one step. Such a step is termed the "rate-limiting" step or the "bottleneck" with the enzyme catalyzing such a step being referred to as the "pacemaker." However, the question of how such a step can be identified and quantified in a given pathway remained unanswered, largely due to the lack of an experimental procedure that describes how such a parameter, the rate-limiting step, can be identified and quantified.