Cookies on this website

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website. If you click 'Accept all cookies' we'll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies and you won't see this message again. If you click 'Reject all non-essential cookies' only necessary cookies providing core functionality such as security, network management, and accessibility will be enabled. Click 'Find out more' for information on how to change your cookie settings.

MOTIVATION: Most current research in network evolution focuses on networks that follow a Duplication Attachment model where the network is only allowed to grow. The evolution of metabolic networks, however, is characterized by gain as well as loss of reactions. It would be desirable to have a biologically relevant model of network evolution that could be used to calculate the likelihood of homologous metabolic networks. RESULTS: We describe metabolic network evolution as a discrete space continuous time Markov process and introduce a neighbor-dependent model for the evolution of metabolic networks where the rates with which reactions are added or removed depend on the fraction of neighboring reactions present in the network. We also present a Gibbs sampler for estimating the parameters of evolution without exploring the whole search space by iteratively sampling from the conditional distributions of the paths and parameters. A Metropolis-Hastings algorithm for sampling paths between two networks and calculating the likelihood of evolution is also presented. The sampler is used to estimate the parameters of evolution of metabolic networks in the genus Pseudomonas. AVAILABILITY: An implementation of the Gibbs sampler in Java is available at http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/ approximately mithani/networkGibbs/. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at the Bioinformatics online.

Original publication

DOI

10.1093/bioinformatics/btp262

Type

Journal article

Journal

Bioinformatics

Publication Date

15/06/2009

Volume

25

Pages

1528 - 1535

Keywords

Algorithms, Computational Biology, Metabolic Networks and Pathways, Models, Statistical, Pseudomonas