The Edinburgh human metabolic network reconstruction and its functional analysis

TLDR

A better understanding of human metabolism and its relationship with diseases is an important task in human systems biology studies. The study aims to present a high‑quality human metabolic network manually reconstructed by integrating genome annotation data from multiple databases with literature‑derived metabolic reactions. The network comprises nearly 3,000 reactions grouped into roughly 70 human‑specific pathways based on functional relationships. Analysis confirms the bow‑tie structure of the network and shows that disease‑related genes are more concentrated in the IN (substrate) subset, indicating greater flexibility there.

Abstract

A better understanding of human metabolism and its relationship with diseases is an important task in human systems biology studies. In this paper, we present a high-quality human metabolic network manually reconstructed by integrating genome annotation information from different databases and metabolic reaction information from literature. The network contains nearly 3000 metabolic reactions, which were reorganized into about 70 human-specific metabolic pathways according to their functional relationships. By analysis of the functional connectivity of the metabolites in the network, the bow-tie structure, which was found previously by structure analysis, is reconfirmed. Furthermore, the distribution of the disease related genes in the network suggests that the IN (substrates) subset of the bow-tie structure has more flexibility than other parts.