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Metabolic networks and their evolution.
Journal article

Metabolic networks and their evolution.

  • Wagner A Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. andreas.wagner@ieu.uzh.ch
  • 2012-07-24
Published in:
  • Advances in experimental medicine and biology. - 2012
Animals
Bacteria
Eukaryotic Cells
Evolution, Molecular
Fungi
Gene Duplication
Gene Transfer, Horizontal
Kinetics
Metabolic Networks and Pathways
Metabolomics
Models, Biological
Prokaryotic Cells
Systems Biology
English Since the last decade of the twentieth century, systems biology has gained the ability to study the structure and function of genome-scale metabolic networks. These are systems of hundreds to thousands of chemical reactions that sustain life. Most of these reactions are catalyzed by enzymes which are encoded by genes. A metabolic network extracts chemical elements and energy from the environment, and converts them into forms that the organism can use. The function of a whole metabolic network constrains evolutionary changes in its parts. I will discuss here three classes of such changes, and how they are constrained by the function of the whole. These are the accumulation of amino acid changes in enzyme-coding genes, duplication of enzyme-coding genes, and changes in the regulation of enzymes. Conversely, evolutionary change in network parts can alter the function of the whole network. I will discuss here two such changes, namely the elimination of reactions from a metabolic network through loss of function mutations in enzyme-coding genes, and the addition of metabolic reactions, for example through mechanisms such as horizontal gene transfer. Reaction addition also provides a window into the evolution of metabolic innovations, the ability of a metabolism to sustain life on new sources of energy and of chemical elements.
Language
  • English
Open access status
closed
Identifiers
Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/35560
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