Development of a Knowledgebase (MetRxn) of Metabolites, Reactions and Atom Mappings to Accelerate Discovery and Redesign
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
With advances in DNA sequencing and genome annotation techniques, the breadth of metabolic knowledge across all kingdoms of life is increasing. The construction of genome-scale models (GSMs) facilitates this distillation of knowledge by systematically accounting for reaction stoichiometry and directionality, gene to protein to reaction relationships, reaction localization among cellular organelles, metabolite transport costs and routes, transcriptional regulation, and biomass composition. Genome-scale reconstructions available now span across all kingdoms of life, from microbes to whole-plant models, and have become indispensable for driving informed metabolic designs and interventions. A key barrier to the pace of this development is our inability to utilize metabolite/reaction information from databases such as BRENDA [1], KEGG [2], MetaCyc [3], etc. due to incompatibilities of representation, duplications, and errors. Duplicate entries constitute a major impediment, where the same metabolite is found with multiple names across databases and models, which significantly slows downs the collating of information from multiple data sources. This can also lead to serious modeling errors such as charge/mass imbalances [4,5] which can thwart model predictive abilities such as identifying synthetic lethal gene pairs and quantifying metabolic flows. Hence, we created the MetRxn database [6] that takes the next step in integrating data from multiple sources and formats to automatically create a standardized knowledgebase. We subsequently deployed this resource to bring about new paradigms in genome-scale metabolic model reconstruction, metabolic flux elucidation through MFA, modeling of microbial communities, and pathway prospecting. This research has enabled the PI’s group to continue building upon research milestones and reach new ones (see list of MetRxn-related publications below).
- Research Organization:
- Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Earth and Environmental Systems Science Division
- DOE Contract Number:
- SC0008091
- OSTI ID:
- 1412096
- Report Number(s):
- SC0008091; SC10822882
- Resource Relation:
- Related Information: A detailed list of publication is provided in the final report including software tools and databases
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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