Uncovering metabolic pathways relevant to phenotypic traits of microbial genomes

Gabi Kastenmüller, Maria Schenk, Johann Gasteiger, Hans-Werner Mewes
2009 Genome Biology  
Microbial metabolic pathways A new machine learning-based method is presented here for the identification of metabolic pathways related to specific phenotypes in multiple microbial genomes. Abstract Identifying the biochemical basis of microbial phenotypes is a main objective of comparative genomics. Here we present a novel method using multivariate machine learning techniques for comparing automatically derived metabolic reconstructions of sequenced genomes on a large scale. Applying our
more » ... to 266 genomes directly led to testable hypotheses such as the link between the potential of microorganisms to cause periodontal disease and their ability to degrade histidine, a link also supported by clinical studies.
doi:10.1186/gb-2009-10-3-r28 pmid:19284550 pmcid:PMC2690999 fatcat:grn3yolcyjcxzgwuzvlfedhwjy