4 ms·

Graph theoretical analysis of human metabolic networks sounds very interesting, can you elaborate on that and/or point to a few papers?

• jboggan 8y ago
  Papers, not really since I was out on the edge at the time and I haven't caught up with the field since then. Nothing I did ever made it into publication but it was pretty interesting. Mostly was focusing on the redundant connectivity of various metabolic pathways in healthy human cell lines and comparing them to the reduced pathways in cancer cells where mutations and large scale chromosomal loss restricted the ability to process and regulate several key compounds. The general idea was to look for pathways that were nearly always preserved even when cancer cells were extremely evolved/mutated from their original lines and map those to drugs that would target the enzymes mediating those reactions. Basically you'd try and knock out a weak link in the cancer metabolic network for which a healthy cell had significant redundancies. A major conceptual difficulty was the somewhat nebulous definition of a metabolic pathway, beyond what reactions were drawn together in a textbook diagram. Also somewhat thorny was the concept of building a network with any sort of transitive property with a notion of mass conservation built in. I wrote about 30k lines of terrible Perl code exploring this stuff, if I had independent backing I would definitely dust it off and finish the project but it's pretty far in the rearview mirror at this point.