La estructura de la red del metabolismo humano

Ponente(s): Laura Lucila Gómez Romero, López-Reyes, K. and Hernández-Lemus, E.
The study of human metabolism is important to understand the cellular response to changes in external or internal environment. However a global analysis of the structure of the network of human metabolism has not been done. In this work we built the network of human metabolism as an undirected network based on KEGG metabolic pathways including metabolic reactions as well as protein-protein and regulatory interactions. A community and perturbation analysis was done. We found that the metabolic network has a highly modular structure (Q = 0.69) which is related to function since pathways in the same community are functionally related. This molecular interaction network was translated into a pathway network using shared molecules between pathways. We systematically removed edges from the molecular network and quantified the effect into the pathway network. We found that the removal of more than two thirds of the molecular interactions are necessary to significantly perturbe the pathway network. We conclude that the human metabolic network is structurally redundant and translate into a highly connected pathway network which is resilient to directed perturbations