Systemic approaches to the study of a biological cell or tissue rely increasingly on the use of context-specific metabolic network models. The reconstruction of such a model from high-throughput data can routinely involve large numbers of tests under different conditions and extensive parameter tuning, which calls for fast algorithms. We present fastcore, a generic algorithm for reconstructing context-specific metabolic network models from global genome-wide metabolic network models such as Recon X. fastcore takes as input a core set of reactions that are known to be active in the context of interest (e.g., cell or tissue), and it searches for a flux consistent subnetwork of the global network that contains all reactions from the core set and a minimal set of additional reactions. Our key observation is that a minimal consistent reconstruction can be defined via a set of sparse modes of the global network, and fastcore iteratively computes such a set via a series of linear programs. Experiments on liver data demonstrate speedups of several orders of magnitude, and significantly more compact reconstructions, over a rival method. Given its simplicity and its excellent performance, fastcore can form the backbone of many future metabolic network reconstruction algorithms.
Several algorithms have been published in the last years for extracting condition-specific models from generic genome-wide models like Recon ,1. Among them, mCADRE @cite_22 , INIT @cite_40 , iMAT @cite_11 , MBA @cite_6 and GIMME @cite_24 are the most commonly used (see table3 for an overview). Here we provide a short outline of the different algorithms, and refer to @cite_7 for a more extensive overview. For GIMME, iMAT, and MBA, we briefly discuss some notable differences to .
@cite_22 @cite_7 @cite_6 @cite_24 @cite_40 @cite_11
2170974939 2107007801 2103950919 2162666840 2144589197 2172129062
Background Human tissues perform diverse metabolic functions. Mapping out these tissue-specific functions in genome-scale models will advance our understanding of the metabolic basis of various physiological and pathological processes. The global knowledgebase of metabolic functions categorized for the human genome (Human Recon 1) coupled with abundant high-throughput data now makes possible the reconstruction of tissue-specific metabolic models. However, the number of available tissue-specific models remains incomplete compared with the large diversity of human tissues. With the advent of high-throughput technologies, the field of systems biology has amassed an abundance of “omics” data, quantifying thousands of cellular components across a variety of scales, ranging from mRNA transcript levels to metabolite quantities. Methods are needed to not only integrate this omics data but to also use this data to heighten the predictive capabilities of computational models. Several recent studies have successfully demonstrated how flux balance analysis (FBA), a constraint-based modeling approach, can be used to integrate transcriptomic data into genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions to generate predictive computational models. In this review, we summarize such FBA-based methods for integrating expression data into genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions, highlighting their advantages as well as their limitations. The computational study of human metabolism has been advanced with the advent of the first generic (non-tissue specific) stoichiometric model of human metabolism. In this study, we present a new algorithm for rapid reconstruction of tissue-specific genome-scale models of human metabolism. The algorithm generates a tissue-specific model from the generic human model by integrating a variety of tissue-specific molecular data sources, including literature-based knowledge, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic and phenotypic data. Applying the algorithm, we constructed the first genome-scale stoichiometric model of hepatic metabolism. The model is verified using standard cross-validation procedures, and through its ability to carry out hepatic metabolic functions. The model's flux predictions correlate with flux measurements across a variety of hormonal and dietary conditions, and improve upon the predictive performance obtained using the original, generic human model (prediction accuracy of 0.67 versus 0.46). Finally, the model better predicts biomarker changes in genetic metabolic disorders than the generic human model (accuracy of 0.67 versus 0.59). The approach presented can be used to construct other human tissue-specific models, and be applied to other organisms. Reconstructions of cellular metabolism are publicly available for a variety of different microorganisms and some mammalian genomes. To date, these reconstructions are “genome-scale” and strive to include all reactions implied by the genome annotation, as well as those with direct experimental evidence. Clearly, many of the reactions in a genome-scale reconstruction will not be active under particular conditions or in a particular cell type. Methods to tailor these comprehensive genome-scale reconstructions into context-specific networks will aid predictive in silico modeling for a particular situation. We present a method called Gene Inactivity Moderated by Metabolism and Expression (GIMME) to achieve this goal. The GIMME algorithm uses quantitative gene expression data and one or more presupposed metabolic objectives to produce the context-specific reconstruction that is most consistent with the available data. Furthermore, the algorithm provides a quantitative inconsistency score indicating how consistent a set of gene expression data is with a particular metabolic objective. We show that this algorithm produces results consistent with biological experiments and intuition for adaptive evolution of bacteria, rational design of metabolic engineering strains, and human skelet al muscle cells. This work represents progress towards producing constraint-based models of metabolism that are specific to the conditions where the expression profiling data is available. Development of high throughput analytical methods has given physicians the potential access to extensive and patient-specific data sets, such as gene sequences, gene expression profiles or metabolite footprints. This opens for a new approach in health care, which is both personalized and based on system-level analysis. Genome-scale metabolic networks provide a mechanistic description of the relationships between different genes, which is valuable for the analysis and interpretation of large experimental data-sets. Here we describe the generation of genome-scale active metabolic networks for 69 different cell types and 16 cancer types using the INIT (Integrative Network Inference for Tissues) algorithm. The INIT algorithm uses cell type specific information about protein abundances contained in the Human Proteome Atlas as the main source of evidence. The generated models constitute the first step towards establishing a Human Metabolic Atlas, which will be a comprehensive description (accessible online) of the metabolism of different human cell types, and will allow for tissue-level and organism-level simulations in order to achieve a better understanding of complex diseases. A comparative analysis between the active metabolic networks of cancer types and healthy cell types allowed for identification of cancer-specific metabolic features that constitute generic potential drug targets for cancer treatment. Summary: iMAT is an Integrative Metabolic Analysis Tool, enabling the integration of transcriptomic and proteomic data with genomescale metabolic network models to predict enzymes’ metabolic flux, based on the method previously described by (Shlomi, 2008). The prediction of metabolic fluxes based on high-throughput molecular data sources could help advance our understanding of cellular metabolism, since current experimental approaches are limited to measuring fluxes through merely a few dozen enzymes.