Chemical Basis of Metabolic Network Organization
Although the metabolic networks of the three domains of life consist of different constituents and metabolic pathways,they exhibit the same scale-free organization.This phenomenon has been hypothetically explained by preferential attachment principle that the new-recruited metabolites attach preferentially to those that are already well connected.However,since metabolites are usually small molecules and metabolic processes are basically chemical reactions,we speculate that the metabolic network organization may have a chemical basis.In this paper,chemoinformatic analyses on metabolic networks of Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG),Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae were performed.It was found that there exist qualitative and quantitative correlations between network topology and chemical properties of metabolites.The metabolites with larger degrees of connectiv ty (hubs) are of relatively stronger polarity.This suggests that metabolic networks are chemically organized to a certain extent,which was further elucidated in terms of high concentrations required by metabolic hubs to drive a variety of reactions,This finding not only provides a chemical explanation to the preferential attachment principle for metabolic network expansion,but also has important implications for metabolic network design and metabolite concentration prediction.
Qiang Zhu Tao Qin Ying-Ying Jiang Cong Ji De-Xin Kong Bin-Guang Ma Hong-Yu Zhang
National Key Laboratory, of Crop Genetic Improvement, College of Life Science and Technology, Huazho Shandong Provincial Research Center for Bioinformatic Engineering and Technique, School of Life Scie Center for Bioinformatics, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China
国际会议
南京
英文
86-93
2012-05-13（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）