Phylophenetic properties of metabolic pathway topologies as revealed by global analysis

Background: As phenotypic features derived from heritable characters, the topologies of metabolic pathways contain both phylogenetic and phenetic components. In the post-genomic era, it is possible to measure the "phylophenetic" contents of different pathways topologies from a global perspective. Results: We reconstructed phylophenetic trees for all available metabolic pathways based on topological similarities, and compared them to the corresponding 16S rRNA-based trees. Similarity values for each pair of trees ranged from 0.044 to 0.297. Using the quartet method, single pathways trees were merged into a comprehensive tree containing information from a large part of the entire metabolic networks. This tree showed considerably higher similarity (0.386) to the corresponding 16S rRNA-based tree than any tree based on a single pathway, but was, on the other hand, sufficiently distinct to preserve unique phylogenetic information not reflected by the 16S rRNA tree. Conclusion: We...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Yong Zhang, Shaojuan Li, Geir Skogerbø, Zhihua Zhang, Xiaopeng Zhu, Zefeng Zhang, Shiwei Sun, Hongchao Lu, Baochen Shi, Runsheng Chen
• Keywords: 16s Rrna-based Tree, BMCBI 2006, Metabolic Pathways, Single Pathway