  Metabolism plays a central role in cell physiology because it provides the
molecular machinery for growth. At the genome-scale, metabolism is made up of
thousands of reactions interacting with one another. Untangling this complexity
is key to understand how cells respond to genetic, environmental, or
therapeutic perturbations. Here we discuss the roles of two complementary
strategies for the analysis of genome-scale metabolic models: Flux Balance
Analysis (FBA) and network science. While FBA estimates metabolic flux on the
basis of an optimisation principle, network approaches reveal emergent
properties of the global metabolic connectivity. We highlight how the
integration of both approaches promises to deliver insights on the structure
and function of metabolic systems with wide-ranging implications in discovery
science, precision medicine and industrial biotechnology.
