The post-”omic” era can be characterized by investigations of dynamic processes within and between cells, tissues and organs. Such investigations are carried out using a combination of interdisciplinary procedures at both the theoretical and experimental level. One aspect of intracellular dynamics is the determination of complex metabolic networks and their high dynamic behavior, and their associated mechanistic pathways. Continuous technical and methodological advances and improvements have meant that biochemical pathway analysis can now be carried out in much greater depth and with increased efficiency and accuracy.
Unfortunately, such progress has led to a confusing and highly undesirable situation with respect to trying to make the maximum use of the experimental data derived from the functional characterizations of enzymes since a variety of experimental designs and analytical methods have been employed. The result is that there is a lack of systematic collections of comparable functional enzyme data. The pre-requisite for both comparability and reliability of such data is the provision of minimum information about experimental design and experimental results as well as standardization of the conditions and procedures involved in the experiments.
However, the current position is not encouraging: the quality of reported experimental data of enzymes is insufficient for the needs of systems level investigations and thus is, in point of fact, neither applicable for modeling and simulation nor for the functional characterization of the individual cellular components.
