Putative regulatory sites unraveled by network-embedded thermodynamic analysis of metabolome data

Abstract

As one of the most recent members of the omics family, large-scale quantitative metabolomics data are currently complementing our systems biology data pool and offer the chance to integrate the metabolite level into the functional analysis of cellular networks. Network-embedded thermodynamic analysis (NET analysis) is presented as a framework for mechanistic and model-based analysis of these data. By exploiting the second law of thermodynamics and the metabolites' Gibbs energies of formation, NET analysis allows inferring functional principles and identifies reactions that are subject to active allosteric or genetic regulation from the coupling of metabolome data and an operating metabolic network as exemplified with quantitative metabolome data from Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Moreover, the optimization framework of NET analysis was demonstrated to be a valuable tool to systematically investigate data sets for consistency, for the extension of sub-omic metabolome data sets and for resolving intracompartmental concentrations from cell-averaged metabolome data. Without requiring any kind of kinetic modeling, NET analysis represents a perfectly scalable and unbiased approach to uncover insights from quantitative metabolome data. © 2006 EMBO and Nature Publishing Group.