The summation theorems can be interpreted in various ways. The first is that the influence enzymes have over steady-state fluxes and concentrations is not necessarily concentrated at one location. In the past, control of a pathway was considered to be located at one point only, called the master reaction or rate limiting step. The summation theorem suggests this does not necessarily have to be the case.
The flux summation theorem also suggests that there is a total amount of flux control in a pathway such that if one step gains control another step most lose control.
Although flux control is shared, this doesn't imply that control is evenly distributed. For a large network, the average flux control will, according to the flux summation theorem, be equal to , that is a small number. In order for a biological cell to have any appreciable control over a pathway via changes in gene expression, some concentration of flux control at a small number of sites will be necessary. For example, in mammalian cancer cell lines, it has been shown that flux control is concentrated at four sites: glucose import, hexokinase, phosphofructokinase, and lactate export.
Moreover, Kacser and Burns suggested that since the flux–enzyme relationship is somewhat hyperbolic, and that for most enzymes, the wild-type diploid level of enzyme activity occurs where the curve is reaching a point in the curve where changes have little effect, then since a heterozygote of the wild-type with a null mutant will have half the enzyme activity it will not exhibit a noticeably reduced flux. Therefore, the wild type appears dominant and the mutant recessive because of the system characteristics of a metabolic pathway. Although originally suggested by Sewall Wright, the development of metabolic control analysis put the idea on a more sound theoretical footing. The flux summation theorem in particular is consistent with the flux summation theorem for large systems. Not all dominance properties can be explained in this way but it does offers an explanation for dominance at least at the metabolic level.