Additional Information
A.3 Modifications of the reaction network
b)
Figure A.6: The scope distributions of single (black) and 100000 random multi scopes (gray) for the KEGG database as of a) April 13, 2005 and b) January 13, 2007 are shown
be accessed in KEGG via Axxxx identifiers. The matching information can be found in the "ALIGN" section of the "rpair" file of the LIGAND database.
This information has been used to compare the size of the overlapping part of two compounds with the sizes of the additional parts.
A.3 Modifications of the reaction network
This section describes certain technical modifications on the computer rep-resentation of the metabolic networks. This should not be confused with chapter 4 where the effect of possibly biologically inferred changes of the network are analyzed.
The first modification considers the abundance of water and its dissoci-ation products oxygen and hydrogen. Water (KEGGID: C00001) is always added to the seed, unless otherwise stated. It can be biologically argued that for biochemical processes it is realistic to assume water to be always present.
Due to dissociation this also holds, to a less extent, for oxygen and hydrogen.
With the available reactions in the full KEGG network oxygen, hydrogen, H2O2 andO2−are automatically synthesized. Hence, the minimum scope size in this network is 5.
The presence of water may have a strong impact on particular scopes.
For example, without water the scope size of APS is only 1 instead of 2183.
Without water the hydrolysis of APS to AMP and sulfate cannot be per-formed.
On the other hand, the general results of the large scale analysis per-formed in this work are mainly unaffected by the presence or absence of water. Figure A.7 shows the scope size distribution for the case with wa-ter and its dissociation products being present and the case where they are not explicitly added. Clearly, the number of single scopes resulting in large scopes is reduced. However, the positions of the characteristic scopes remain unchanged. For the scopes of random multi seeds also the frequencies are mainly unchanged. This can be explained by the fact, that when taking 15 arbitrary compounds, in most cases from at least one of them water can be produced.
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000
scope size 1
10 100 1000
occurence (w/o water) 1 10 100 1000
occurence (with water)
Figure A.7: The effect of water and its dissociation products on the scope sizes. The black curves indicate single scopes and gray curves 10000 scopes of 15 random seed compounds. The upper distribution shows scopes with water, etc. being always present, the lower graph shows scopes calculated without this modification. Note that the sets of random seeds are different for the two cases.
Analogous to water also other cofactors can be assumed as abundant.
Clearly, if a biological cell converts external resources into the desired prod-ucts it can rely on certain cofactors to be already present. In principle, in a growing and dividing cell also these cofactors have to be produced. For the analysis of smaller pathways, however, the abundance of cofactors may be a useful assumption. Furthermore, it should be noted that the production
of a cofactor may require the same cofactor to be present in first place, like for example ATP in glycolysis. Also in this case the assumption about the abundance of the cofactor is helpful.
Unlike in the case of water, it is not possible to simply add other cofactors.
The reason is that this cofactor would be used to synthesize other compounds.
In the case of ATP for example the minimum scope size would be 1554. Of course, the same arguments hold also for water, but the eventual effect is much smaller in this case since water only consists of the two element H and O.
In order to simulate only the functionality of a cofactor the following modifications were applied to the network: For cofactor pairs like ATP/ADP or NAD+/NADH, in all reactions containing the members of such a pair on different sides with the same stoichiometry, these cofactors were removed.
The conservation of elements was corrected afterwards, i.e. for each ATP a phosphate and for each NADH a H+ was added.
The cofactor coenzyme A had to be dealt with differently. Coenzyme A clips off acyl groups from one molecule and transfers them in a second reac-tion to a second molecule. In order to simulate its funcreac-tionality it was added to the seed, but all reactions synthesizing or degrading it were manually removed.
Whereas water has always been assumed to be present, this is not true for other cofactors. Their influence is analyzed in more detail in section 2.5.
A.4 Derivation of the reversible Michaelis-Menten Equation
An enzymatic reaction
C k+
*) k−
P
is split up into two sub reactions:
E+C k1+
*) k1−
EC k2+
*) k2−
E+P and
v1 =k1+eY
k
ck−k1−z v2 =k2+z−k2−eY
k
pk (A.4)
Here, C, P and E represent the substrates, products and the enzyme, respectively. the ks are the rates of the corresponding sub reactions and v1 and v2 are their effective velocities. z represents the concentration of the enzyme-substrate-complex, e the concentration of the free enzyme and ck and pk the concentrations of the substrates and products. If the two reactions proceed in a faster time scale than the changes in the metabolite concentrations of the substrates C and the products P, a quasi steady state approximation for z can be used:
dz
= ˆe
The reaction rate of the complete reaction v can be written as:
v =v1 =v2 =
As mentioned in section 2.2, only compounds containing exactly the same elements can be interconvertible. However, the number of available reactions in metabolism is limited and thus not all such conversions exist. Within each group of compounds containing the same elements, all pairs of compounds were analyzed for being interconvertible. The corresponding numbers and the percentage of interconvertible pairs are given in table A.1. Within each group of compounds containing the same elements exists one or more sub groups whose compounds are interconvertible. If a compound is not interconvertible with any other compound, the corresponding sub group has a size of one. The last column in able A.1 gives the relative size distribution of these groups, where the shading is only used for distinguishing between the groups.
Elements totcom totpair numiccom numicpair %icpair numgroups groupdist
w/o 333 55278 41 29 0.0525% 18
As.C.H.O 2 1 0 0 0% 0
As.O 2 1 0 0 0% 0
Br 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Br.C.Cl.H 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Br.C.H.N.O 3 3 0 0 0% 0
Br.C.H.N.O.S 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Br.C.H.O 5 10 4 6 60% 1
Br.C.H.O.S 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Br.H 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.Cl 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.Cl.H 25 300 12 13 4.33% 4
C.Cl.H.N 6 15 2 1 6.67% 1
C.Cl.H.N.O 15 105 5 4 3.81% 2
C.Cl.H.N.O.P.S 2 1 0 0 0% 0
C.Cl.H.O 71 2485 37 66 2.66% 11
C.Cl.O 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.Co.H.N.O 13 78 2 1 1.28% 1
C.Co.H.N.O.P 9 36 0 0 0% 0
C.F.H.O 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.F.H.O.P 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.Fe.H.N.O 6 15 0 0 0% 0
C.Fe.H.N.O.S 3 3 2 1 33.3% 1
C.H 54 1431 7 5 0.349% 3
C.H.I.N.O 4 6 0 0 0% 0
C.H.I.O 5 10 0 0 0% 0
C.H.Mg.N.O 10 45 7 11 24.4% 2
C.H.N 62 1891 8 28 1.48% 1
C.H.N.O 966 466095 382 9705 2.08% 88
C.H.N.O.P 363 65703 161 4659 7.09% 22
C.H.N.O.P.S 186 17205 89 214 1.24% 27
C.H.N.O.P.Se 2 1 0 0 0% 0
C.H.N.O.S 113 6328 37 123 1.94% 10
C.H.N.O.Se 12 66 5 4 6.06% 2
C.H.N.S 7 21 2 1 4.76% 1
C.H.O 1501 1125750 575 6126 0.544% 153
C.H.O.P 191 18145 94 1172 6.46% 14
C.H.O.P.S 5 10 2 1 10% 1
C.H.O.S 58 1653 3 3 0.181% 1
C.H.O.X 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.H.S 3 3 0 0 0% 0
C.H.Se 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.N 1 1 0 0 0% 0
C.O 2 1 2 1 100% 1
C.O.S 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Cl 2 1 0 0 0% 0
Cl.H 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Cl.H.O 2 1 0 0 0% 0
Elements totcom totpair numiccom numicpair %icpair numgroups groupdist
Co 1 1 0 0 0% 0
F 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Fe 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H.N 2 1 2 1 100% 1
H.N.O 5 10 3 3 30% 1
H.N.O.P 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H.O 3 3 2 1 33.3% 1
H.O.P 5 10 4 6 60% 1
H.O.P.Se 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H.O.S 6 15 3 3 20% 1
H.O.Se 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H.S 1 1 0 0 0% 0
H.Se 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Hg 2 1 0 0 0% 0
I 2 1 2 1 100% 1
Mg 1 1 0 0 0% 0
Mn 1 1 0 0 0% 0
N 1 1 0 0 0% 0
N.O 2 1 0 0 0% 0
O 2 1 2 1 100% 1
O.S 2 1 0 0 0% 0
O.Se 1 1 0 0 0% 0
S 1 1 0 0 0% 0
X 1 1 0 0 0% 0
all 4104 8419356 1568 23954 0.285% 387
Table A.1:
Table A.1: Interconvertibilities of compounds in the KEGG network. The com-pounds are categorized according to their element content. The first column gives the element composition. "w/o" indicates all compounds without a for-mula given, "all" is the set of all compounds. The second column indicates the number of compounds and the third column the number of pairs with these compounds. The fourth column gives the number of compounds which are in-terconvertible with at least one other compound. The fifth column holds the number of interconvertible pairs. The sixth column gives the percentage of how many of all pairs are interconvertible. The seventh column gives the number of groups of interconvertible compounds which contain more than one compound.
The last column shows the distribution of groups of interconvertible compounds.
The shading is used to distinguish between neighboring groups.