Metabolic Networks
With the advent of next-generation sequencing techniques, it is now easier to obtain high throughput data revealing what is encoded in an organism's genome. From this information the systems biology community can build metabolic networks at the genome scale and use various techniques to study the distribution of reaction rates at the steady state, identify alternative pathways, characterize gene knock-outs and much more.
Because of their high dimension and therefore complexity, these models lack detailed information on, e.g., the kinetics of the reactions. However, these models can provide a lot of information from their structure, and from information about flux distributions in steady state.
We use different databases like MetaCyc, BioCyc or ModelSeed in order to access the available information and investigate properties of metabolic networks of different organisms. We try to understand metabolic routes of non-conventional metabolic processes found in many interesting prokaryotic organisms by reconstructing genome scale metabolic models of organisms.
Furthermore, we apply topological approaches like metabolic network expansion to investigate metabolic capacities of organisms. This functional characterization can be used to calculate scopes of metabolic activity, impacts of reactions on networks and evolutionary distances between organisms.
Contact: Nima Saadat, Oliver Ebenhöh
Key Publications