Reconstructing phylogeny from metabolic substrate-product relationships

Abstract

Background: Many approaches utilize metabolic pathway information to reconstruct the phyletic tree of fully sequenced organisms, but how metabolic networks can add information to original genomic annotations has remained open.Methods: We translated enzyme reactions assigned in 1075 organisms into substrate-product relationships to represent the metabolic information at a finer resolution than enzymes and compounds. Each organism was represented as a vector of substrate-product relationships and the phyletic tree was reconstructed by a simple hierarchical method. Obtained results were compared with several other approaches that use genome information and network properties.Results: Phyletic trees without consideration of network properties can already extract organisms in anomalous environments. This efficient method can add insights to traditional genome-based phylogenetic reconstruction.Conclusions: Structural relationship among metabolites can highlight parasitic or symbiont species such as spirochaete and clamydia. The method assists understanding of species-environment interaction when used in combination with traditional phylogenetic methods. © 2011 Chang et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd.