Metabolic network destruction: Relating topology to robustness

Metabolic network destruction: Relating topology to robustness

Winterbach, W.
Wang, H.
Reinders, M.
Van Mieghem, P.
De Ridder, D.

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Network Architectures and Services

2010-12-01

Biological networks exhibit intriguing topological properties such as small-worldness. In this paper, we investigate whether the topology of a metabolic network is related to its robustness. We do so by perturbing a metabolic system in silico, one reaction at a time and studying the correlations between growth, as predicted by flux balance analysis, and a number of topological metrics, as computed from three network representations of the metabolic system. We find that a small number of metrics correlate with growth and that only one of the network representations stands out in terms of correlated metrics. The most correlated metrics point to the importance of hub nodes in this network: so-called "currency metabolites". Since they are responsible for interconnecting distant functional modules in the network, they are important points in the networks for predicting if reaction removal affects growth. Source code and data are available upon request.

metabolic networks
ux balance analysis
network topology
robustness

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a5e4ab47-eed4-4180-b346-da086e826a02

International ICST Conference on Bio-Inspired Models of Network, Information and Computing Systems (BIONETICS 2010), 1-3 december 2010

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2010 Winterbach, W.; Wang, H.; Reinders, M.; Van Mieghem, P.; De Ridder, D.