A pathway approach to align regulatory-metabolic networks

Y. Li*, J. J. Bot, M. J. Reinders, D. De Ridder

Information and Communication Theory Group, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands. y.li@tudelft.nl

Proc LSS Comput Syst Bioinform Conf. August, 2009. Vol. 8, p. 177-188. Full-Text PDF

*To whom correspondence should be addressed.

Integrating different types of biological networks and aligning networks across species are two useful but challenging comparative methods in systems biology nowadays. By combining these in one framework, we can expect to generate more reliable information and hypotheses. In this study, we systematically integrate the transcriptional regulation network of enzyme-coding genes and the corresponding metabolic network, and align these integrated networks between two species. By applying a comprehensive yet flexible scoring function to measure the alignment similarity, our method can be used to identify conserved elements (allowing for small variations) of evolution at both the regulatory and metabolic level, to reveal the interrelation and divergence between species and to use information at one level to predict missing information at the other level.