Shortest Paths with Pairwise-Distinct Edge Labels: Finding Biochemical Pathways in Metabolic Networks

TL;DR

This paper addresses the challenge of finding biologically feasible shortest paths in metabolic networks by using edge labels to ensure path validity, demonstrating computational hardness and proposing practical solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to incorporate biochemical constraints into shortest path computations and provides algorithms to find such paths efficiently.

Findings

Biologically feasible shortest paths are computationally hard to find.

Proposed algorithms can find these paths within reasonable time.

Edge label constraints improve the biological relevance of pathfinding.

Abstract

A problem studied in Systems Biology is how to find shortest paths in metabolic networks. Unfortunately, simple (i.e., graph theoretic) shortest paths do not properly reflect biochemical facts. An approach to overcome this issue is to use edge labels and search for paths with distinct labels. In this paper, we show that such biologically feasible shortest paths are hard to compute. Moreover, we present solutions to find such paths in networks in reasonable time.