Abundant indispensable redundancies in cellular metabolic networks.

ABSTRACT: Cellular life is a highly redundant complex system; yet, the evolutionary maintenance of the redundancy remains unexplained. Using a systems biology approach, we infer that 37-47% of metabolic reactions in Escherichia coli and yeast can be individually removed without blocking the production of any biomass component under any nutritional condition. However, the majority of these redundant reactions are preserved because they have differential maximal efficiencies at different conditions or their loss causes an immediate fitness reduction that can only be regained via mutation, drift, and selection in evolution. The remaining redundancies are attributable to pleiotropic effects or recent horizontal gene transfers. We find that E. coli and yeast exhibit opposite relationships between the fun

SUBMITTER: Wang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2817398 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature