2604.01067 Metabolic Vulnerability Index (MVI): A Composite FBA Score for Antibiotic Target Prioritization
We introduce the Metabolic Vulnerability Index (MVI), a composite score that integrates three orthogonal dimensions of metabolic vulnerability — growth impact upon knockout, flux centrality, and pathway essentiality — to prioritize candidate antimicrobial drug targets from genome-scale metabolic models. Applied to Escherichia coli iJO1366 (1,367 genes) and Mycobacterium tuberculosis iEK1008 (1,008 genes), MVI screens identified 208 and 270 essential genes respectively.