Comparative classification of species and the study of pathway evolution based on the alignment of metabolic pathways

Background: Pathways provide topical descriptions of cellular circuitry. Comparing analogous pathways reveals intricate insights into individual functional differences among species. While previous works in the field performed genomic comparisons and evolutionary studies that were based on specific genes or proteins, whole genomic sequence, or even single pathways, none of them described a genomic system level comparative analysis of metabolic pathways. In order to properly implement such an analysis one should overcome two specific challenges: how to combine the effect of many pathways under a unified framework and how to appropriately analyze co-evolution of pathways. Here we present a computational approach for solving these two challenges. First, we describe a comprehensive, scalable, information theory based computational pipeline that calculates pathway alignment information and then compiles it in a novel manner that allows further analysis. This approach can be used for buildi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Adi Mano, Tamir Tuller, Oded Béjà, Ron Y. Pinter
• Keywords: Analogous Pathways, BMCBI 2010, Metabolic Pathways, Single Pathways