Abstract
Recent small-world studies of the global structure of metabolic networks have been based on the shortest-path distance. In this paper, we propose new distance measures that are based on the structure of feasible metabolic pathways between metabolites. We argue that these distances capture the complexity of the underlying biochemical processes more accurately than the shortest-path distance. To test our approach in practice, we calculated our distances and shortest-path distances in two microbial organisms, S. cerevisiae and E. coli. The results show that metabolite interconversion is significantly more complex than was suggested in previous small-world studies. We also studied the effect of reaction removals (gene knock-outs) on the connectivity of the S. cerevisiae network and found out that the network is not particularly robust against such mutations.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Arita, M.: The metabolic world of Escherichia coli is not small. PNAS 101(6), 1543–1547 (2004)
Bylander, T.: The computational complexity of propositional STRIPS planning. Artificial Intelligence 69(1-2), 165–204 (1994)
Ebenhöh, O., Handorf, T., Heinrich, R.: Structural analysis of expanding metabolic networks. Genome Informatics 15(1), 35–45 (2004)
Förster, J., Famili, I., Fu, P., Palsson, B., Nielsen, J.: Genome-scale reconstruction of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae metabolic network. Genome Research (13), 244–253 (2003)
Jeong, H., Tombor, B., Albert, R., Oltvai, Z.N., Barabási, A.-L.: The large-scale organization of metabolic networks. Nature (407), 651–654 (2000)
Kanehisa, M., Goto, S.: Kegg: Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes. Nucleic Acids Res 28, 27–30 (2000)
Kleinberg, J.: The small-world phenomenon: An algorithmic perspective. In: Proc. 32nd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (2000)
Krieger, C.J., Zhang, P., Mueller, L.A., Wang, A., Paley, S., Arnaud, M., Pick, J., Rhee, S.Y., Karp, P.D.: MetaCyc: a multiorganism database of metabolic pathways and enzymes. Nucleic Acids Research 32(1), D438–442 (2004)
Ma, H.-W., Zeng, A.-P.: Reconstruction of metabolic networks from genome data and analysis of their global structure for various organisms. Bioinformatics 19(2), 270–277 (2003)
Russell, S.J., Norvig, P.: Artifical Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 2nd edn. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (2003)
Schilling, C.H., Letscher, D., Palsson, B.: Theory for the systemic definition of metabolic pathways and their use in interpreting metabolic function from a pathway-oriented perspective. Journal of Theoretical Biology (203), 228–248 (2003)
Schuster, S., Fell, D.A., Dandekar, T.: A general definition of metabolic pathways useful for systematic organization and analysis of complex metabolic network. Nature Biotechnology 18, 326–332 (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Pitkänen, E., Rantanen, A., Rousu, J., Ukkonen, E. (2005). Finding Feasible Pathways in Metabolic Networks. In: Bozanis, P., Houstis, E.N. (eds) Advances in Informatics. PCI 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3746. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11573036_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11573036_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-29673-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32091-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)