No Arabic abstract
A system-level framework of complex microbe-microbe and host-microbe chemical cross-talk would help elucidate the role of our gut microbiota in health and disease. Here we report a literature-curated interspecies network of the human gut microbiota, called NJS16. This is an extensive data resource composed of ~570 microbial species and 3 human cell types metabolically interacting through >4,400 small-molecule transport and macromolecule degradation events. Based on the contents of our network, we develop a mathematical approach to elucidate representative microbial and metabolic features of the gut microbial community in a given population, such as a disease cohort. Applying this strategy to microbiome data from type 2 diabetes patients reveals a context-specific infrastructure of the gut microbial ecosystem, core microbial entities with large metabolic influence, and frequently-produced metabolic compounds that might indicate relevant community metabolic processes. Our network presents a foundation towards integrative investigations of community-scale microbial activities within the human gut.
Here we present ComPPI, a cellular compartment specific database of proteins and their interactions enabling an extensive, compartmentalized protein-protein interaction network analysis (http://ComPPI.LinkGroup.hu). ComPPI enables the user to filter biologically unlikely interactions, where the two interacting proteins have no common subcellular localizations and to predict novel properties, such as compartment-specific biological functions. ComPPI is an integrated database covering four species (S. cerevisiae, C. elegans, D. melanogaster and H. sapiens). The compilation of nine protein-protein interaction and eight subcellular localization data sets had four curation steps including a manually built, comprehensive hierarchical structure of more than 1600 subcellular localizations. ComPPI provides confidence scores for protein subcellular localizations and protein-protein interactions. ComPPI has user-friendly search options for individual proteins giving their subcellular localization, their interactions and the likelihood of their interactions considering the subcellular localization of their interacting partners. Download options of search results, whole proteomes, organelle-specific interactomes and subcellular localization data are available on its website. Due to its novel features, ComPPI is useful for the analysis of experimental results in biochemistry and molecular biology, as well as for proteome-wide studies in bioinformatics and network science helping cellular biology, medicine and drug design.
We present a model for continuous cell culture coupling intra-cellular metabolism to extracellular variables describing the state of the bioreactor, taking into account the growth capacity of the cell and the impact of toxic byproduct accumulation. We provide a method to determine the steady states of this system that is tractable for metabolic networks of arbitrary complexity. We demonstrate our approach in a toy model first, and then in a genome-scale metabolic network of the Chinese hamster ovary cell line, obtaining results that are in qualitative agreement with experimental observations. More importantly, we derive a number of consequences from the model that are independent of parameter values. First, that the ratio between cell density and dilution rate is an ideal control parameter to fix a steady state with desired metabolic properties invariant across perfusion systems. This conclusion is robust even in the presence of multi-stability, which is explained in our model by the negative feedback loop on cell growth due to toxic byproduct accumulation. Moreover, a complex landscape of steady states in continuous cell culture emerges from our simulations, including multiple metabolic switches, which also explain why cell-line and media benchmarks carried out in batch culture cannot be extrapolated to perfusion. On the other hand, we predict invariance laws between continuous cell cultures with different parameters. A practical consequence is that the chemostat is an ideal experimental model for large-scale high-density perfusion cultures, where the complex landscape of metabolic transitions is faithfully reproduced. Thus, in order to actually reflect the expected behavior in perfusion, performance benchmarks of cell-lines and culture media should be carried out in a chemostat.
Alzheimers disease is the most common form of dementia in the western world, however there is no cure available for this devastating neurodegenerative disorder. Despite clinical and experimental evidence implicating the intestinal microbiota in a number of brain disorders, its impact on Alzheimers disease is not known. We generated a germ-free mouse model of Alzheimers disease and discovered a drastic reduction of cerebral Ab amyloid pathology when compared to control Alzheimers disease animals with intestinal microbiota. Sequencing bacterial 16S rRNA from fecal samples revealed a remarkable shift in the gut microbiota of conventionally-raised Alzheimers disease mice as compared to healthy, wild-type mice. Colonization of germ-free Alzheimer mice with harvested microbiota from conventionally-raised Alzheimer mice dramatically increased cerebral Ab pathology. In contrast, colonization with microbiota from control wild-type mice was ineffective in increasing cerebral Ab levels. Our results indicate a microbial involvement in the development of Alzheimers disease pathology, and suggest that microbiota may contribute to the development of neurodegenerative diseases.
The phenotype of any organism on earth is, in large part, the consequence of interplay between numerous gene products encoded in the genome, and such interplay between gene products affects the evolutionary fate of the genome itself through the resulting phenotype. In this regard, contemporary genomes can be used as molecular records that reveal associations of various genes working in their natural lifestyles. By analyzing thousands of orthologs across ~600 bacterial species, we constructed a map of gene-gene co-occurrence across much of the sequenced biome. If genes preferentially co-occur in the same organisms, they were called herein correlogs; in the opposite case, called anti-correlogs. To quantify correlogy and anti-correlogy, we alleviated the contribution of indirect correlations between genes by adapting ideas developed for reverse engineering of transcriptional regulatory networks. Resultant correlogous associations are highly enriched for physically interacting proteins and for co-expressed transcripts, clearly differentiating a subgroup of functionally-obligatory protein interactions from conditional or transient interactions. Other biochemical and phylogenetic properties were also found to be reflected in correlogous and anti-correlogous relationships. Additionally, our study elucidates the global organization of the gene association map, in which various modules of correlogous genes are strikingly interconnected by anti-correlogous crosstalk between the modules. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of such associations along different domains of life and environmental microbial communities. These phylogenetic profiling approaches infer functional coupling of genes regardless of mechanistic details, and may be useful to guide exogenous gene import in synthetic biology.
Cellular metabolism, the integrated interconversion of thousands of metabolic substrates through enzyme-catalyzed biochemical reactions, is the most investigated complex intercellular web of molecular interactions. While the topological organization of individual reactions into metabolic networks is increasingly well understood, the principles governing their global functional utilization under different growth conditions pose many open questions. We implement a flux balance analysis of the E. coli MG1655 metabolism, finding that the network utilization is highly uneven: while most metabolic reactions have small fluxes, the metabolisms activity is dominated by several reactions with very high fluxes. E. coli responds to changes in growth conditions by reorganizing the rates of selected fluxes predominantly within this high flux backbone. The identified behavior likely represents a universal feature of metabolic activity in all cells, with potential implications to metabolic engineering.