SSER: Species specific essential reactions database

Labena et al. BMC Systems Biology (2017) 11:50 DOI 10.1186/s12918-017-0426-0 DATABASE Open Access SSER: Species specific essential reactions database Abraham A. Labena1,2,3†, Yuan-Nong Ye4†, Chuan Dong1,2, Fa-Z Zhang1,2 and Feng-Biao Guo1,2,5* Abstract Background: Essential reactions are vital components of cellular networks. They are the foundations of synthetic biology and are potential candidate targets for antimetabolic drug design. Especially if a single reaction is catalyzed by multiple enzymes, then inhibiting the reaction would be a better option than targeting the enzymes or the corresponding enzyme-encoding gene. The existing databases such as BRENDA, BiGG, KEGG, Bio-models, Biosilico, and many others offer useful and comprehensive information on biochemical reactions. But none of these databases especially focus on essential reactions. Therefore, building a centralized repository for this class of reactions would be of great value. Description: Here, we present a species-specific essential reactions database (SSER). The current version comprises essential biochemical and transport reactions of twenty-six organisms which are identified via flux balance analysis (FBA) combined with manual curation on experimentally validated metabolic network models. Quantitative data on the number of essential reactions, number of the essential reactions associated with their respective enzymeencoding genes and shared essential reactions across organisms are the main contents of the database. Conclusion: SSER would be a prime source to obtain essential reactions data and related gene and metabolite information and it can significantly facilitate the metabolic network models reconstruction and analysis, and drug target discovery studies. Users can browse, search, compare and download the essential reactions of organisms of their interest through the website http://cefg.uestc.edu.cn/sser. Keywords: SSER, Database, Essential Reactions, Flux Balance Analysis (FBA), Metabolic Networks Background Despite their complexity, the reconstructed metabolic networks are important tools to visualize the ‘omics’ data and foster understanding and interpretation of these data in terms of biological functions [1]. Reconstruction of such networks is time intensive and requires extensive effort, costing several months to years depending on the genome size and number of personnel involved [2]. Although the degree of indispensability is not uniformly equal for all of the reactions in the network, each reaction in the metabolic network contributes for the proper functionality of the biological system of the * Correspondence: † Equal contributors 1 Center of Bioinformatics, Key Laboratory for Neuro-Information of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China 2 Center for Informational Biology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article organism in one or other way. Consequently, these reactions are classified as either essential or non-essential. The essential ones are those reactions which are vital for the viability of the organism in a given living conditions than non-essential ones. Some of the reactions are universally essential irrespective of the environment in which the organism is situated, these reactions are identified for a model organism and termed as “superessential” in the network [3]. Following the whole genome sequencing and biological systems modeling, the number of predictive metabolic network models has been growing significantly. Consequently, tremendous numbers of biological databases storing metabolic pathway information have been developed. Although the efforts have contributed greatly to the understanding of the systems biology of a considerable number of organisms, finding the reaction essentiality data in a centralized repository has given little attention. The existing databases such as KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of © The Author(s). 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Labena et al. BMC Systems Biology (2017) 11:50 Genes and Genomes) [4], BIGG (Biochemical Genetic and Genomic, Systems Biology Research Group of University of California San Diego) [5], Biocyc, Metacyc [6], Ecocyc [7], Bio-models [8], the model SEED [9], GSMN (Genome-Scale Models Database, Tian Jin University) [10], Biosilico [11] and many others offer comprehensive information on biochemical reactions [12], but none of them especially focus on essential reactions. Therefore, building a centralized repository for this class of reactions would be of great value. Essential reactions are potential candidate targets for antimetabolic drug design [3, 13, 14]. Especially if a single reaction is catalyzed by multiple enzymes, then inhibiting the reaction would be a better option than targeting the enzymes itself or the corresponding enzyme-coding gene [15] and this was the key driving force for us towards constructing species-specific essential reactions database (SSER). The current version (version 1.0) of SSER includes essential biochemical and transport reactions of twenty-six organisms. The reactions were obtained by applying flux balance analysis (FBA) on experimentally validated metabolic network models in in-silico growth conditions in combination with manual curation of each reaction. Besides to storing biochemically essential reactions, SSER can allow the users to obtain information related to the enzyme-coding genes, essential precursors, and products in a defined in in-silico growth conditions. The information from SSER can also have a significant role in biotechnology based industries as essential reactions can be used to increase the yields of production in these industries. Construction and content Data acquisition and source Comprehensive, latest and experimentally validated genome-scale metabolic network model versions were downloaded (Nov-Dec 2015) from publically accessible model repositories, mainly BiGG, GSMN and authors’ publications (Additional file 1). It means that a model is selected from multiple versions of an organism, if it is the most up to date, contains comprehensive information and experimentally validated. For instance, we chose to use iJO1366 because it was the most up to date version of Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 at the time of model co (...truncated)