Metabolic network percolation quantifies biosynthetic capabilities across the human oral microbiome.

ABSTRACT: The biosynthetic capabilities of microbes underlie their growth and interactions, playing a prominent role in microbial community structure. For large, diverse microbial communities, prediction of these capabilities is limited by uncertainty about metabolic functions and environmental conditions. To address this challenge, we propose a probabilistic method, inspired by percolation theory, to computationally quantify how robustly a genome-derived metabolic network produces a given set of metabolites under an ensemble of variable environments. We used this method to compile an atlas of predicted biosynthetic capabilities for 97 metabolites across 456 human oral microbes. This atlas captures taxonomically-related trends in biomass composition, and makes it possible to estimate inter-microbial

SUBMITTER: Bernstein DB 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6609349 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature