What is COBRA?
The COnstraints Based Reconstruction and Analysis (COBRA) approach to systems biology accepts the fact that we do not possess sufficiently detailed parameter data to precisely model, in the biophysical sense, an organism at genome-scale.
Increasingly, omics data has been used to define the set of feasible states for a biological network in a given condition based on current knowledge. These constraints include compartmentalization, mass conservation, molecular crowding, and thermodynamic directionality. More recently, transcriptome data have been used to reduce the size of the set of computed feasible states.
Although COBRA methods may not provide a unique solution, they provide a reduced set of solutions that may be used to guide biological hypothesis development. Given its success, COBRA has attracted attention from many investigators and has developed rapidly in recent years based on contributions from a growing number of laboratories – COBRA methods have been used in hundreds of studies to deal with the complex relationships and high dimensionality of the next generation of COBRA models.
