Phylogenetic tree reconstruction from genome-scale metabolic models

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to compare genome-scale metabolic models to infer evolutionary relationships and reconstruct phylogenetic trees across diverse species.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology for quantifying metabolic differences and applying them to phylogenetic tree reconstruction from genome-scale models.

Findings

Effective comparison of metabolic networks across species

Successful reconstruction of phylogenetic trees from metabolic data

Quantification of metabolic differences across broad taxonomic groups

Abstract

A wide range of applications and research has been done with genome-scale metabolic models. In this work we describe a methodology for comparing metabolic networks constructed from genome-scale metabolic models and how to apply this comparison in order to infer evolutionary distances between different organisms. Our methodology allows a quantification of the metabolic differences between different species from a broad range of families and even kingdoms. This quantification is then applied in order to reconstruct phylogenetic trees for sets of various organisms.