Reconstructing the metabolic network of a bacterium from its genome

Abstract

The prospect of understanding the relationship between the genome and the physiology of an organism is an important incentive to reconstruct metabolic networks. The first steps in the process can be automated and it does not take much effort to obtain an initial metabolic reconstruction from a genome sequence. However, such a reconstruction is certainly not flawless and correction of the many imperfections is laborious. It requires the combined analysis of the available information on protein sequence, phylogeny, gene-context and co-occurrence but is also aided by high-throughput experimental data. Simultaneously, the reconstructed network provides the opportunity to visualize the "omics" data within a relevant biological functional context and thus aids the interpretation of those data.