%0 Journal Article
%T Structural comparison of metabolic networks in selected single cell organisms
%A Dongxiao Zhu
%A Zhaohui S Qin
%J BMC Bioinformatics
%D 2005
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2105-6-8
%X Three groups of topological properties were used in this study: network indices, degree distribution measures and motif profile measure. All of which are higher-level topological properties except for the marginal degree distribution. Metabolic networks in Archaeal species are found to be different from those in S. cerevisiae and the six Bacterial species in almost all measured higher-level topological properties. Our findings also indicate that the metabolic network in Archaeal species is similar to the exponential random network.If these metabolic network properties of the organisms studied can be extended to other species in their respective domains (which is likely), then the design principle(s) of Archaea are fundamentally different from those of Bacteria and Eukaryote. Furthermore, the functional mechanisms of Archaeal metabolic networks revealed in this study differentiate significantly from those of Bacterial and Eukaryotic organisms, which warrant further investigation.Classification of biological organisms is of fundamental importance to evolutionary studies. It is commonly believed that there are three domains of life: Archaea, Bacteria and Eukaryote. Currently, the most popular classification method is the so called "molecular approach", in which polymorphism information in DNA or protein sequence is exploited to assess the phylogenetic relationships among species [1,2]. To a large extent, this is a "local" approach since the choice of sequence for comparison greatly affects the final result, "lateral gene transfer" (LGT) and thus the resulting "genome chimerism" further complicates the situation [3]. A new "system" approach that takes "global" properties of each organism into consideration serves as a potential alternative to overcome this shortcoming. Indeed, recent advances in system biology and increasingly available genomic databases have made it possible to rebuild biological networks from genomic data and have offered opportunity for such a "syste
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/6/8