The metabolic world of Escherichia coli is not samll

March 09, 2004
Chun-Yu Chen

Abstract

Recent studies reconstructed the organism-specific metabolic network by considering the enzymatic reactions as edges between compounds (nodes), and analyzed the global properties of each network. But the network reconstructed by these methods do not consider their structural changes in metabolites and therefore are not consistent with the traditional biochemical pathway. In this work, we use the atomic tracing method to computationally detect the structrual change in metabolic reactoins, furthermore, to re-evaluate and compare with the previous results. Our analysis found that the average path length of metabolic network in E. coli is longer than previous thought.

from PNAS 101 (6): 1543-1547.

References:

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