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Quantifying carbon traffic by isotope-assisted metabolic flux analysis. A computationally designed combination of stable isotope (e.g. 13C and 12C) carbon sources is fed to an organism (left), which synthesizes metabolites from these carbon sources; 13C-12C patterns in these metabolites (isotopomers) are quantified by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and/or mass spectrometry (center). Fluxes are evaluated from the isotopomer abundance data by various computational techniques (right).