Central Carbon Metabolism

In recent year, it is of keen interest to investigate the relationship between the structure and function of microbial metabolic networks in systems biology. Central carbon metabolism plays an important role in metabolic network and is composed of the flow of carbon from nutrients into biomass. With the assistance of advanced analytical technologies and decades of painstaking efforts, the structures and functions of the pathways for the carbon flux has been significantly clarified. In the classic textbook, the central carbon metabolism is defined as composed of the glycolysis pathway, the citric acid cycle, the pentose phosphate pathway, six known carbon fixation pathways and some pathways of methane metabolism, though the definition of this metabolism is remains to be validated with experiments.