Historical contingency and the gradual evolution of metabolic properties in central carbon and genome-scale metabolisms

Table 2 Fragmentation occurs in central carbon metabolisms close to minimal number of reactions

Number of reactions in a metabolism ( n)	Number of viable potential metabolisms V(n)	Number of components	Fraction of viable metabolisms in the largest connected component
23	3	2	0.667
24	91	2	0.637
25	1333	2	0.997
26	12512	2	0.992
27	84344	1	1
28	434238	2	0.977

For each metabolism size, the table shows the number of viable potential metabolisms, the number of components, and the fraction of genotypes in the largest component. The genotype network comprising metabolisms of size 23 contains three metabolisms, of which two form one component and the other is isolated from them. For metabolisms of size 24, the two components are almost of the same size, and the larger component contains 63.74 percent of the viable genotypes. For larger metabolisms, the genotype network is largely connected, with more than 97 percent of genotypes belonging to the largest component.

ISSN: 1752-0509