MOTIVATION: Characterizing all steady-state flux distributions in metabolic models remains limited to small models due to the explosion of possibilities. Often it is sufficient to look only at all possible overall conversions a cell can catalyze ignoring the details of intracellular metabolism. Such a characterization is achieved by elementary conversion modes (ECMs), which can be conveniently computed with ecmtool. However, currently, ecmtool is memory intensive, and it cannot be aided appreciably by parallelization. RESULTS: We integrate mplrs-a scalable parallel vertex enumeration method-into ecmtool. This speeds up computation, drastically reduces memory requirements and enables ecmtool's use in standard and high-performance computing environments. We show the new capabilities by enumerating all feasible ECMs of the near-complete metabolic model of the minimal cell JCVI-syn3.0. Despite the cell's minimal character, the model gives rise to 4.2×109 ECMs and still contains several redundant sub-networks. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ecmtool is available at https://github.com/SystemsBioinformatics/ecmtool. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

BACKGROUND: Elementary flux mode (EFM) analysis is a well-established, yet computationally challenging approach to characterize metabolic networks. Standard algorithms require huge amounts of memory and lack scalability which limits their application to single servers and consequently limits a comprehensive analysis to medium-scale networks. Recently, Avis et al. developed mplrs-a parallel version of the lexicographic reverse search (lrs) algorithm, which, in principle, enables an EFM analysis on high-performance computing environments (Avis and Jordan. mplrs: a scalable parallel vertex/facet enumeration code. arXiv:1511.06487 , 2017). Here we test its applicability for EFM enumeration. RESULTS: We developed EFMlrs, a Python package that gives users access to the enumeration capabilities of mplrs. EFMlrs uses COBRApy to process metabolic models from sbml files, performs loss-free compressions of the stoichiometric matrix, and generates suitable inputs for mplrs as well as efmtool, providing support not only for our proposed new method for EFM enumeration but also for already established tools. By leveraging COBRApy, EFMlrs also allows the application of additional reaction boundaries and seamlessly integrates into existing workflows. CONCLUSION: We show that due to mplrs's properties, the algorithm is perfectly suited for high-performance computing (HPC) and thus offers new possibilities for the unbiased analysis of substantially larger metabolic models via EFM analyses. EFMlrs is an open-source program that comes together with a designated workflow and can be easily installed via pip.