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

Table 1 The number of minimal metabolisms in genotype networks from the central carbon metabolism

Number of reactions in a metabolism ( n)	Number of components	Number of viable metabolisms V(n)	Number of minimal metabolisms	Fraction of minimal metabolisms
23	2	3	3	1
24	2	91	8	0.08791
25	2	1333	23	0.01725
26	2	12512	14	0.00111
27	1	84344	27	0.00032
28	2	434238	43	9.9 x 10^-5
29	1	1773969	28	1.57 x 10^-5
30	1	5900578	15	2.54 x 10^-5

The left-most column shows the number of reactions n in a potential metabolism, the second column from the left shows the number of disconnected components into which the genotype network of these viable metabolisms fragments, the third column shows the number of viable potential metabolisms for each n, and the fourth column shows the number of minimal metabolisms. Note that the fraction of minimal metabolisms (column five) decreases as metabolism size n increases.

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