scholarly journals Fast automated reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic models for microbial species and communities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Machado ◽  
Sergej Andrejev ◽  
Melanie Tramontano ◽  
Kiran Raosaheb Patil
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Single Species ◽  
Model Organisms ◽  
Universal Model ◽  
Microbial Species ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
User Friendly ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
Automated Tool

AbstractGenome-scale metabolic models are instrumental in uncovering operating principles of cellular metabolism and model-guided re-engineering. Recent applications of metabolic models have also demonstrated their usefulness in unraveling cross-feeding within microbial communities. Yet, the application of genome-scale models, especially to microbial communities, is lagging far behind the availability of sequenced genomes. This is largely due to the time-consuming steps of manual cura-tion required to obtain good quality models and thus physiologically meaningful simulation results. Here, we present an automated tool – CarveMe – for reconstruction of species and community level metabolic models. We introduce the concept of a universal model, which is manually curated and simulation-ready. Starting with this universal model and annotated genome sequences, CarveMe uses a top-down approach to build single-species and community models in a fast and scalable manner. We build reconstructions for two model organisms, Escherichia coli and Bacillus subtillis, as well as a collection of human gut bacteria, and show that CarveMe models perform similarly to manually curated models in reproducing experimental phenotypes. Finally, we demonstrate the scalability of CarveMe through reconstructing 5587 bacterial models. Overall, CarveMe provides an open-source and user-friendly tool towards broadening the use of metabolic modeling in studying microbial species and communities.

scholarly journals Deciphering the metabolic capabilities of Bifidobacteria using genome-scale metabolic models

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
N. T. Devika ◽  
Karthik Raman
Keyword(s):  
Short Chain Fatty Acids ◽  
Acetate Production ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Powerful Approach ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Commercial Applications ◽  
Different Strains ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
Modelling Approach

AbstractBifidobacteria, the initial colonisers of breastfed infant guts, are considered as the key commensals that promote a healthy gastrointestinal tract. However, little is known about the key metabolic differences between different strains of these bifidobacteria, and consequently, their suitability for their varied commercial applications. In this context, the present study applies a constraint-based modelling approach to differentiate between 36 important bifidobacterial strains, enhancing their genome-scale metabolic models obtained from the AGORA (Assembly of Gut Organisms through Reconstruction and Analysis) resource. By studying various growth and metabolic capabilities in these enhanced genome-scale models across 30 different nutrient environments, we classified the bifidobacteria into three specific groups. We also studied the ability of the different strains to produce short-chain fatty acids, finding that acetate production is niche- and strain-specific, unlike lactate. Further, we captured the role of critical enzymes from the bifid shunt pathway, which was found to be essential for a subset of bifidobacterial strains. Our findings underline the significance of analysing metabolic capabilities as a powerful approach to explore distinct properties of the gut microbiome. Overall, our study presents several insights into the nutritional lifestyles of bifidobacteria and could potentially be leveraged to design species/strain-specific probiotics or prebiotics.

scholarly journals BiGG Models 2020: multi-strain genome-scale models and expansion across the phylogenetic tree

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles J Norsigian ◽  
Neha Pusarla ◽  
John Luke McConn ◽  
James T Yurkovich ◽  
Andreas Dräger ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Phylogenetic Tree ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
The Past ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
New Community ◽  
Genome Annotations ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
High Quality Genome ◽  
Strain Genome

Abstract The BiGG Models knowledge base (http://bigg.ucsd.edu) is a centralized repository for high-quality genome-scale metabolic models. For the past 12 years, the website has allowed users to browse and search metabolic models. Within this update, we detail new content and features in the repository, continuing the original effort to connect each model to genome annotations and external databases as well as standardization of reactions and metabolites. We describe the addition of 31 new models that expand the portion of the phylogenetic tree covered by BiGG Models. We also describe new functionality for hosting multi-strain models, which have proven to be insightful in a variety of studies centered on comparisons of related strains. Finally, the models in the knowledge base have been benchmarked using Memote, a new community-developed validator for genome-scale models to demonstrate the improving quality and transparency of model content in BiGG Models.

scholarly journals metaGEM: reconstruction of genome scale metabolic models directly from metagenomes

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Zorrilla ◽  
Kiran R. Patil ◽  
Aleksej Zelezniak
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Metabolic Modeling ◽  
Large Degree ◽  
Metabolic Model ◽  
Community Level ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Context Specific ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
Reference Genomes

AbstractAdvances in genome-resolved metagenomic analysis of complex microbial communities have revealed a large degree of interspecies and intraspecies genetic diversity through the reconstruction of metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs). Yet, metabolic modeling efforts still tend to rely on reference genomes as the starting point for reconstruction and simulation of genome scale metabolic models (GEMs), neglecting the immense intra- and inter-species diversity present in microbial communities. Here we present metaGEM (https://github.com/franciscozorrilla/metaGEM), an end-to-end highly scalable pipeline enabling metabolic modeling of multi-species communities directly from metagenomic samples. The pipeline automates all steps from the extraction of context-specific prokaryotic GEMs from metagenome assembled genomes to community level flux balance simulations. To demonstrate the capabilities of the metaGEM pipeline, we analyzed 483 samples spanning lab culture, human gut, plant associated, soil, and ocean metagenomes, to reconstruct over 14 000 prokaryotic GEMs. We show that GEMs reconstructed from metagenomes have fully represented metabolism comparable to the GEMs reconstructed from reference genomes. We further demonstrate that metagenomic GEMs capture intraspecies metabolic diversity by identifying the differences between pathogenicity levels of type 2 diabetes at the level of gut bacterial metabolic exchanges. Overall, our pipeline enables simulation-ready metabolic model reconstruction directly from individual metagenomes, provides a resource of all reconstructed metabolic models, and showcases community-level modeling of microbiomes associated with disease conditions allowing generation of mechanistic hypotheses.

scholarly journals Efficient enzyme coupling algorithms identify functional pathways in genome-scale metabolic models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dikshant Pradhan ◽  
Jason A. Papin ◽  
Paul A. Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Metabolic Engineering ◽  
Mathematical Framework ◽  
Continuous Variables ◽  
Convex Constraints ◽  
Coupling Analysis ◽  
Flux Coupling ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
Flux Coupling Analysis

AbstractFlux coupling identifies sets of reactions whose fluxes are “coupled" or correlated in genome-scale models. By identified sets of coupled reactions, modelers can 1.) reduce the dimensionality of genome-scale models, 2.) identify reactions that must be modulated together during metabolic engineering, and 3.) identify sets of important enzymes using high-throughput data. We present three computational tools to improve the efficiency, applicability, and biological interpretability of flux coupling analysis.The first algorithm (cachedFCF) uses information from intermediate solutions to decrease the runtime of standard flux coupling methods by 10-100 fold. Importantly, cachedFCF makes no assumptions regarding the structure of the underlying model, allowing efficient flux coupling analysis of models with non-convex constraints.We next developed a mathematical framework (FALCON) that incorporates enzyme activity as continuous variables in genome-scale models. Using data from gene expression and fitness assays, we verified that enzyme sets calculated directly from FALCON models are more functionally coherent than sets of enzymes collected from coupled reaction sets.Finally, we present a method (delete-and-couple) for expanding enzyme sets to allow redundancies and branches in the associated metabolic pathways. The expanded enzyme sets align with known biological pathways and retain functional coherence. The expanded enzyme sets allow pathway-level analyses of genome-scale metabolic models.Together, our algorithms extend flux coupling techniques to enzymatic networks and models with transcriptional regulation and other non-convex constraints. By expanding the efficiency and flexibility of flux coupling, we believe this popular technique will find new applications in metabolic engineering, microbial pathogenesis, and other fields that leverage network modeling.

scholarly journals Fast automated reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic models for microbial species and communities

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (15) ◽  
pp. 7542-7553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Machado ◽  
Sergej Andrejev ◽  
Melanie Tramontano ◽  
Kiran Raosaheb Patil
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Species ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Genome Scale

scholarly journals Pathway-based and phylogenetically adjusted quantification of metabolic interaction between microbial species

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony J. Lam ◽  
Moses Stamboulian ◽  
Wontack Han ◽  
Yuzhen Ye
Keyword(s):  
Microbial Communities ◽  
Bacterial Species ◽  
Microbial Interactions ◽  
Phylogenetic Distance ◽  
Phylogenetic Relatedness ◽  
Bacterial Interactions ◽  
Competition And Cooperation ◽  
Microbial Species ◽  
Metabolic Interactions ◽  
Genome Scale

AbstractMicrobial community members exhibit various forms of interactions. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of microbiome data, many computational approaches have been developed to infer bacterial interactions from the co-occurrence of microbes across diverse microbial communities. Additionally, the introduction of genome-scale metabolic models have also enabled the inference of metabolic interactions, such as competition and cooperation, between bacterial species. By nature, phylogenetically similar microbial species are likely to share common functional profiles or biological pathways due to their genomics similarity. Without properly factoring out the phylogenetic relationship, any estimation of the competition and cooperation based on functional/pathway profiles may bias downstream applications.To address these challenges, we developed a novel approach for estimating the competition and complementarity indices for a pair of microbial species, adjusted by their phylogenetic distance. An automated pipeline, PhyloMint, was implemented to construct competition and complementarity indices from genome scale metabolic models derived from microbial genomes. Application of our pipeline to 2,815 human-gut bacteria showed high correlation between phylogenetic distance and metabolic competition/cooperation indices among bacteria. Using a discretization approach, we were able to detect pairs of bacterial species with cooperation scores significantly higher than the average pairs of bacterial species with similar phylogenetic distances. A network community analysis of high metabolic cooperation but low competition reveals distinct modules of bacterial interactions. Our results suggest that niche differentiation plays a dominant role in microbial interactions, while habitat filtering also plays a role among certain clades of bacterial species.Author summaryMicrobial communities, also known as microbiomes, are formed through the interactions of various microbial species. Utilizing genomic sequencing, it is possible to infer the compositional make-up of communities as well as predict their metabolic interactions. However, because some species are more similarly related to each other, while others are more distantly related, one cannot directly compare metabolic relationships without first accounting for their phylogenetic relatedness. Here we developed a computational pipeline which predicts complimentary and competitive metabolic relationships between bacterial species, while normalizing for their phylogenetic relatedness. Our results show that phylogenetic distances are correlated with metabolic interactions, and factoring out such relationships can help better understand microbial interactions which drive community formation.

scholarly journals GEMtractor: Extracting Views into Genome-scale Metabolic Models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Scharm ◽  
Olaf Wolkenhauer ◽  
Mahdi Jalili ◽  
Ali Salehzadeh-Yazdi
Keyword(s):  
Topological Analysis ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Link Type ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Multipartite Graphs ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Genome Scale

ABSTRACTSummaryComputational metabolic models typically encode for graphs of species, reactions, and enzymes. Comparing genome-scale models through topological analysis of multipartite graphs is challenging. However, in many practical cases it is not necessary to compare the full networks. The GEMtractor is a web-based tool to trim models encoded in SBML. It can be used to extract subnetworks, for example focusing on reaction- and enzyme-centric views into the model.Availability and ImplementationThe GEMtractor is licensed under the terms of GPLv3 and developed at github.com/binfalse/GEMtractor – a public version is available at sbi.uni-rostock.de/[email protected] and [email protected]

scholarly journals Model-based and phylogenetically adjusted quantification of metabolic interaction between microbial species

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (10) ◽  
pp. e1007951
Author(s):  
Tony J. Lam ◽  
Moses Stamboulian ◽  
Wontack Han ◽  
Yuzhen Ye
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Role ◽  
Bacterial Species ◽  
Community Analysis ◽  
Microbial Interactions ◽  
Phylogenetic Distance ◽  
Metabolic Cooperation ◽  
Bacterial Interactions ◽  
Microbial Species ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Genome Scale

Microbial community members exhibit various forms of interactions. Taking advantage of the increasing availability of microbiome data, many computational approaches have been developed to infer bacterial interactions from the co-occurrence of microbes across diverse microbial communities. Additionally, the introduction of genome-scale metabolic models have also enabled the inference of cooperative and competitive metabolic interactions between bacterial species. By nature, phylogenetically similar microbial species are more likely to share common functional profiles or biological pathways due to their genomic similarity. Without properly factoring out the phylogenetic relationship, any estimation of the competition and cooperation between species based on functional/pathway profiles may bias downstream applications. To address these challenges, we developed a novel approach for estimating the competition and complementarity indices for a pair of microbial species, adjusted by their phylogenetic distance. An automated pipeline, PhyloMint, was implemented to construct competition and complementarity indices from genome scale metabolic models derived from microbial genomes. Application of our pipeline to 2,815 human-gut associated bacteria showed high correlation between phylogenetic distance and metabolic competition/cooperation indices among bacteria. Using a discretization approach, we were able to detect pairs of bacterial species with cooperation scores significantly higher than the average pairs of bacterial species with similar phylogenetic distances. A network community analysis of high metabolic cooperation but low competition reveals distinct modules of bacterial interactions. Our results suggest that niche differentiation plays a dominant role in microbial interactions, while habitat filtering also plays a role among certain clades of bacterial species.

scholarly journals Integration of Time-Series Transcriptomic Data with Genome-Scale CHO Metabolic Models for mAb Engineering

Processes ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 331 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhuangrong Huang ◽  
Seongkyu Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Cell Lines ◽  
Chinese Hamster ◽  
Parental Cell ◽  
Process Conditions ◽  
Parental Cell Line ◽  
Specific Cell ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
The Impact

Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells are the most commonly used cell lines in biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Genome-scale metabolic models have become a valuable tool to study cellular metabolism. Despite the presence of reference global genome-scale CHO model, context-specific metabolic models may still be required for specific cell lines (for example, CHO-K1, CHO-S, and CHO-DG44), and for specific process conditions. Many integration algorithms have been available to reconstruct specific genome-scale models. These methods are mainly based on integrating omics data (i.e., transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) into reference genome-scale models. In the present study, we aimed to investigate the impact of time points of transcriptomics integration on the genome-scale CHO model by assessing the prediction of growth rates with each reconstructed model. We also evaluated the feasibility of applying extracted models to different cell lines (generated from the same parental cell line). Our findings illustrate that gene expression at various stages of culture slightly impacts the reconstructed models. However, the prediction capability is robust enough on cell growth prediction not only across different growth phases but also in expansion to other cell lines.

scholarly journals ErrorTracer: an algorithm for identifying the origins of inconsistencies in genome-scale metabolic models

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolay Martyushenko ◽  
Eivind Almaas
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Work Flow ◽  
Supplementary Information ◽  
Scale Models ◽  
Model Size ◽  
Metabolic Models ◽  
Model Publication ◽  
Genome Scale ◽  
Model Visualization ◽  
Community Standard

Abstract Motivation The number and complexity of genome-scale metabolic models is steadily increasing, empowered by automated model-generation algorithms. The quality control of the models, however, has always remained a significant challenge, the most fundamental being reactions incapable of carrying flux. Numerous automated gap-filling algorithms try to address this problem, but can rarely resolve all of a model’s inconsistencies. The need for fast inconsistency checking algorithms has also been emphasized with the recent community push for automated model-validation before model publication. Previously, we wrote a graphical software to allow the modeller to solve the remaining errors manually. Nevertheless, model size and complexity remained a hindrance to efficiently tracking origins of inconsistency. Results We developed the ErrorTracer algorithm in order to address the shortcomings of existing approaches: ErrorTracer searches for inconsistencies, classifies them and identifies their origins. The algorithm is ∼2 orders of magnitude faster than current community standard methods, using only seconds even for large-scale models. This allows for interactive exploration in direct combination with model visualization, markedly simplifying the whole error-identification and correction work flow. Availability and implementation Windows and Linux executables and source code are available under the EPL 2.0 Licence at https://github.com/TheAngryFox/ModelExplorer and https://www.ntnu.edu/almaaslab/downloads. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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