Publication Date:
2014-05-21
Description:
Background: Comparing the metabolic pathways of different species is useful for understanding metabolic functionsand can help in studying diseases and engineering drugs. Several comparison techniques formetabolic pathways have been introduced in the literature as a first attempt in this direction. Theapproaches are based on some simplified representation of metabolic pathways and on a related definitionof a similarity score (or distance measure) between two pathways. More recent comparativeresearch focuses on alignment techniques that can identify similar parts between pathways. Results: We propose a methodology for the pairwise comparison and alignment of metabolic pathways thataims at providing the largest conserved substructure of the pathways under consideration. The proposedmethodology has been implemented in a tool calledMP-Align, which has been used to performseveral validation tests. The results showed that our similarity score makes it possible to discriminatebetween different domains and to reconstruct a meaningful phylogeny from metabolic data. Theresults further demonstrate that our alignment algorithm correctly identifies subpathways sharing acommon biological function. Conclusion: The results of the validation tests performed with MP-Align are encouraging. A comparison withanother proposal in the literature showed that our alignment algorithm is particularly well-suited tofinding the largest conserved subpathway of the pathways under examination.
Electronic ISSN:
1752-0509
Topics:
Biology
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