scholarly journals Phenotypic innovation through recombination in genome-scale metabolic networks

2016 ◽  
Vol 283 (1839) ◽  
pp. 20161536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sayed-Rzgar Hosseini ◽  
Olivier C. Martin ◽  
Andreas Wagner

Recombination is an important source of metabolic innovation, especially in prokaryotes, which have evolved the ability to survive on many different sources of chemical elements and energy. Metabolic systems have a well-understood genotype–phenotype relationship, which permits a quantitative and biochemically principled understanding of how recombination creates novel phenotypes. Here, we investigate the power of recombination to create genome-scale metabolic reaction networks that enable an organism to survive in new chemical environments. To this end, we use flux balance analysis, an experimentally validated computational method that can predict metabolic phenotypes from metabolic genotypes. We show that recombination is much more likely to create novel metabolic abilities than random changes in chemical reactions of a metabolic network. We also find that phenotypic innovation is more likely when recombination occurs between parents that are genetically closely related, phenotypically highly diverse, and viable on few rather than many carbon sources. Survival on a new carbon source preferentially involves reactions that are superessential, that is, essential in many metabolic networks. We validate our observations with data from 61 reconstructed prokaryotic metabolic networks. Our systematic and quantitative analysis of metabolic systems helps understand how recombination creates innovation.

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S Krueger ◽  
Christian Munck ◽  
Gautam Dantas ◽  
George M Church ◽  
James Galagan ◽  
...  

Flux balance analysis (FBA) is an increasingly useful approach for modeling the behavior of metabolic systems. However, standard FBA modeling of genetic knockouts can not predict drug combination synergies observed between serial metabolic targets, even though such synergies give rise to some of the most widely used antibiotic treatments. Here we extend FBA modeling to simulate responses to chemical inhibitors at varying concentrations, by diverting enzymatic flux to a waste reaction. This flux diversion yields very similar qualitative predictions to prior methods for single target activity. However, we find very different predictions for combinations, where flux diversion, which mimics the kinetics of competitive metabolic inhibitors, can explain serial target synergies between metabolic enzyme inhibitors that we confirmed in Escherichia coli cultures. FBA flux diversion opens the possibility for more accurate genome-scale predictions of drug synergies, which can be used to suggest treatments for infections and other diseases.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parizad Babaei ◽  
Tahereh Ghasemi-Kahrizsangi ◽  
Sayed-Amir Marashi

To date, several genome-scale metabolic networks have been reconstructed. These models cover a wide range of organisms, from bacteria to human. Such models have provided us with a framework for systematic analysis of metabolism. However, little effort has been put towards comparing biochemical capabilities of closely related species using their metabolic models. The accuracy of a model is highly dependent on the reconstruction process, as some errors may be included in the model during reconstruction. In this study, we investigated the ability of threePseudomonasmetabolic models to predict the biochemical differences, namely, iMO1086, iJP962, and iSB1139, which are related toP. aeruginosaPAO1,P. putidaKT2440, andP. fluorescensSBW25, respectively. We did a comprehensive literature search for previous works containing biochemically distinguishable traits over these species. Amongst more than 1700 articles, we chose a subset of them which included experimental results suitable forin silicosimulation. By simulating the conditions provided in the actual biological experiment, we performed case-dependent tests to compare thein silicoresults to the biological ones. We found out that iMO1086 and iJP962 were able to predict the experimental data and were much more accurate than iSB1139.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vimaladhasan Senthamizhan ◽  
Sunanda Subramaniam ◽  
Arjun Raghavan ◽  
Karthik Raman

AbstractSummaryGenome-scale metabolic networks have been reconstructed for hundreds of organisms over the last two decades, with wide-ranging applications, including the identification of drug targets. Constraint-based approaches such as flux balance analysis have been effectively used to predict single and combinatorial drug targets in a variety of metabolic networks. We have previously developed Fast-SL, an efficient algorithm to rapidly enumerate all possible synthetic lethals from metabolic networks. Here, we introduce CASTLE, an online standalone database, which contains synthetic lethals predicted from the metabolic networks of over 130 organisms. These targets include single, double or triple lethal set of genes and reactions, and have been predicted using the Fast-SL algorithm. The workflow used for building CASTLE can be easily applied to other pathogenic models and used to identify novel therapeutic targets.AvailabilityCASTLE is available at https://ramanlab.github.io/CASTLE/[email protected]


Microbiome ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Jansma ◽  
Sahar El Aidy

AbstractThe human gut harbors an enormous number of symbiotic microbes, which is vital for human health. However, interactions within the complex microbiota community and between the microbiota and its host are challenging to elucidate, limiting development in the treatment for a variety of diseases associated with microbiota dysbiosis. Using in silico simulation methods based on flux balance analysis, those interactions can be better investigated. Flux balance analysis uses an annotated genome-scale reconstruction of a metabolic network to determine the distribution of metabolic fluxes that represent the complete metabolism of a bacterium in a certain metabolic environment such as the gut. Simulation of a set of bacterial species in a shared metabolic environment can enable the study of the effect of numerous perturbations, such as dietary changes or addition of a probiotic species in a personalized manner. This review aims to introduce to experimental biologists the possible applications of flux balance analysis in the host-microbiota interaction field and discusses its potential use to improve human health.


2010 ◽  
Vol 38 (5) ◽  
pp. 1225-1229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evangelos Simeonidis ◽  
Ettore Murabito ◽  
Kieran Smallbone ◽  
Hans V. Westerhoff

Advances in biological techniques have led to the availability of genome-scale metabolic reconstructions for yeast. The size and complexity of such networks impose limits on what types of analyses one can perform. Constraint-based modelling overcomes some of these restrictions by using physicochemical constraints to describe the potential behaviour of an organism. FBA (flux balance analysis) highlights flux patterns through a network that serves to achieve a particular objective and requires a minimal amount of data to make quantitative inferences about network behaviour. Even though FBA is a powerful tool for system predictions, its general formulation sometimes results in unrealistic flux patterns. A typical example is fermentation in yeast: ethanol is produced during aerobic growth in excess glucose, but this pattern is not present in a typical FBA solution. In the present paper, we examine the issue of yeast fermentation against respiration during growth. We have studied a number of hypotheses from the modelling perspective, and novel formulations of the FBA approach have been tested. By making the observation that more respiration requires the synthesis of more mitochondria, an energy cost related to mitochondrial synthesis is added to the FBA formulation. Results, although still approximate, are closer to experimental observations than earlier FBA analyses, at least on the issue of fermentation.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javad Zamani ◽  
Sayed-Amir Marashi ◽  
Tahmineh Lohrasebi ◽  
Mohammad-Ali Malboobi ◽  
Esmail Foroozan

Genome-scale metabolic models (GSMMs) have enabled researchers to perform systems-level studies of living organisms. As a constraint-based technique, flux balance analysis (FBA) aids computation of reaction fluxes and prediction of...


PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0240953
Author(s):  
Christian Schulz ◽  
Eivind Almaas

Approaches for systematizing information of relatedness between organisms is important in biology. Phylogenetic analyses based on sets of highly conserved genes are currently the basis for the Tree of Life. Genome-scale metabolic reconstructions contain high-quality information regarding the metabolic capability of an organism and are typically restricted to metabolically active enzyme-encoding genes. While there are many tools available to generate draft reconstructions, expert-level knowledge is still required to generate and manually curate high-quality genome-scale metabolic models and to fill gaps in their reaction networks. Here, we use the tool AutoKEGGRec to construct 975 genome-scale metabolic draft reconstructions encoded in the KEGG database without further curation. The organisms are selected across all three domains, and their metabolic networks serve as basis for generating phylogenetic trees. We find that using all reactions encoded, these metabolism-based comparisons give rise to a phylogenetic tree with close similarity to the Tree of Life. While this tree is quite robust to reasonable levels of noise in the metabolic reaction content of an organism, we find a significant heterogeneity in how much noise an organism may tolerate before it is incorrectly placed in the tree. Furthermore, by using the protein sequences for particular metabolic functions and pathway sets, such as central carbon-, nitrogen-, and sulfur-metabolism, as basis for the organism comparisons, we generate highly specific phylogenetic trees. We believe the generation of phylogenetic trees based on metabolic reaction content, in particular when focused on specific functions and pathways, could aid the identification of functionally important metabolic enzymes and be of value for genome-scale metabolic modellers and enzyme-engineers.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (14) ◽  
pp. i548-i557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus Heinonen ◽  
Maria Osmala ◽  
Henrik Mannerström ◽  
Janne Wallenius ◽  
Samuel Kaski ◽  
...  

AbstractMotivationMetabolic flux balance analysis (FBA) is a standard tool in analyzing metabolic reaction rates compatible with measurements, steady-state and the metabolic reaction network stoichiometry. Flux analysis methods commonly place model assumptions on fluxes due to the convenience of formulating the problem as a linear programing model, while many methods do not consider the inherent uncertainty in flux estimates.ResultsWe introduce a novel paradigm of Bayesian metabolic flux analysis that models the reactions of the whole genome-scale cellular system in probabilistic terms, and can infer the full flux vector distribution of genome-scale metabolic systems based on exchange and intracellular (e.g. 13C) flux measurements, steady-state assumptions, and objective function assumptions. The Bayesian model couples all fluxes jointly together in a simple truncated multivariate posterior distribution, which reveals informative flux couplings. Our model is a plug-in replacement to conventional metabolic balance methods, such as FBA. Our experiments indicate that we can characterize the genome-scale flux covariances, reveal flux couplings, and determine more intracellular unobserved fluxes in Clostridium acetobutylicum from 13C data than flux variability analysis.Availability and implementationThe COBRA compatible software is available at github.com/markusheinonen/bamfa.Supplementary informationSupplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


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