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We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.

MiS Preprint
12/2010

Genotype networks in metabolic reaction spaces

Areejit Samal, Joao Matias Rodrigues, Jürgen Jost, Olivier Martin and Andreas Wagner

Abstract

Background: A metabolic genotype comprises all chemical reactions an organism can catalyze via enzymes encoded in its genome. A genotype is viable in a given environment if it is capable of producing all biomass components the organism needs to survive and reproduce. Previous work has focused on the properties of individual genotypes while little is known about how genome-scale metabolic networks with a given function can vary in their reaction content.

Results: We here characterize spaces of such genotypes. Specifically, we study metabolic genotypes whose phenotype is viability in minimal chemical environments that differ in their sole carbon sources. We show that regardless of the number of reactions in a metabolic genotype, the genotypes of a given phenotype typically form vast, connected, and unstructured sets -- genotype networks -- that nearly span the whole of genotype space. The robustness of metabolic phenotypes to random reaction removal in such spaces has a narrow distribution with a high mean. Different carbon sources differ in the number of metabolic genotypes in their genotype network; this number decreases as a genotype is required to be viable on increasing numbers of carbon sources, but much less than if metabolic reactions were used independently across different chemical environments.

Conclusions: Our work shows that phenotype-preserving genotype networks have generic organizational properties and that these properties are insensitive to the number of reactions in metabolic genotypes.

Received:
Feb 25, 2010
Published:
Feb 25, 2010

Related publications

inJournal
2010 Journal Open Access
Areejit Samal, Joao Matias Rodrigues, Jürgen Jost, Olivier Martin and Andreas Wagner

Genotype networks in metabolic reaction spaces

In: BMC systems biology, 4 (2010), p. 30