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Compensatory ability to null mutation in metabolic networks
Author(s) -
Jiang Da,
Zhou Shuigeng,
Chen YiPing Phoebe
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
biotechnology and bioengineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 189
eISSN - 1097-0290
pISSN - 0006-3592
DOI - 10.1002/bit.22237
Subject(s) - robustness (evolution) , organism , archaea , metabolic network , biology , systems biology , biological system , computational biology , biochemical engineering , model organism , bacteria , genetics , gene , engineering
Robustness is an inherent property of biological system. It is still a limited understanding of how it is accomplished at the cellular or molecular level. To this end, this article analyzes the impact degree of each reaction to others, which is defined as the number of cascading failures of following and/or forward reactions when an initial reaction is deleted. By analyzing more than 800 organism's metabolic networks, it suggests that the reactions with larger impact degrees are likely essential and the universal reactions should also be essential. Alternative metabolic pathways compensate null mutations, which represents that average impact degrees for all organisms are small. Interestingly, average impact degrees of archaea organisms are smaller than other two categories of organisms, eukayote and bacteria, indicating that archaea organisms have strong robustness to resist the various perturbations during the evolution process. The results show that scale‐free feature and reaction reversibility contribute to the robustness in metabolic networks. The optimal growth temperature of organism also relates the robust structure of metabolic network. Biotechnol. Bioeng. 2009;103: 361–369. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.