Link to Pubmed [PMID] – 18820265
Bioinformatics 2008 Nov;24(22):2579-85
Although metabolic reactions are unquestionably shaped by evolutionary processes, the degree to which the overall structure and complexity of their interconnections are linked to the phylogeny of species has not been evaluated in depth. Here, we apply an original metabolome representation, termed Network of Interacting Pathways or NIP, with a combination of graph theoretical and machine learning strategies, to address this question. NIPs compress the information of the metabolic network exhibited by a species into much smaller networks of overlapping metabolic pathways, where nodes are pathways and links are the metabolites they exchange.