13CFLUX2-high-performance software suite for 13C-metabolic flux analysis

C-13-based metabolic flux analysis (C-13-MFA) is the state-of-the-art method to quantitatively determine in vivo metabolic reaction rates in microorganisms. 13CFLUX2 contains all tools for composing flexible computational C-13-MFA workflows to design and evaluate carbon labeling experiments. A specially developed XML language, FluxML, highly efficient data structures and simulation algorithms achieve a maximum of performance and effectiveness. Support of multicore CPUs, as well as compute clusters, enables scalable investigations. 13CFLUX2 outperforms existing tools in terms of universality, flexibility and built-in features. Therewith, 13CFLUX2 paves the way for next-generation high-resolution C-13-MFA applications on the large scale.