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

Summary: (13)C-based metabolic flux analysis ((13)C-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 (13)C-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 (13)C-MFA applications on the large scale. Availability and implementation: 13CFLUX2 is implemented in C++ (ISO/IEC 14882 standard) with Java and Python add-ons to run under Linux/Unix. A demo version and binaries are available at www.13cflux.net. Contact: info@13cflux.net or k.noeh@fz-juelich.de Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.