ArticlePLoS computational biology2009
Evolutionary plasticity and innovations in complex metabolic reaction networks.
Article in PLoS computational biology, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers.
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Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Before LUCA: unearthing the chemical roots of metabolism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- The structure of an ancient genotype-phenotype map shaped the functional evolution of a protein family.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Competition and cooperation: The plasticity of bacterial interactions across environments.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- The structure of an ancient genotype-phenotype map shaped the functional evolution of a protein family.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Spinocerebellar ataxia 38: structure-function analysis shows ELOVL5 G230V is proteotoxic, conformationally altered and a mutational hotspot.Human genetics · 2023Article
- Conflicting effects of recombination on the evolvability and robustness in neutrally evolving populations.PLoS computational biology · 2022Review
- What makes a reaction network "chemical"?Journal of cheminformatics · 2022Article
- A synthetic synthesis to explore animal evolution and development.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Clinically relevant mutations in core metabolic genes confer antibiotic resistance.Science (New York, N.Y.) · 2021Article
- Bacterial fitness landscapes stratify based on proteome allocation associated with discrete aero-types.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Quantum aspects of evolution: a contribution towards evolutionary explorations of genotype networks via quantum walks.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- Genotype networks of 80 quantitative Arabidopsis thaliana phenotypes reveal phenotypic evolvability despite pervasive epistasis.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Using small samples to estimate neutral component size and robustness in the genotype-phenotype map of RNA secondary structure.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2020Article
- The translational network for metabolic disease - from protein interaction to disease co-occurrence.BMC bioinformatics · 2019Article
- Metabolic Determinants of Enzyme Evolution in a Genome-Scale Bacterial Metabolic Network.Genome biology and evolution · 2018Article
- On the deformability of an empirical fitness landscape by microbial evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- An enormous potential for niche construction through bacterial cross-feeding in a homogeneous environment.PLoS computational biology · 2018Article
- On the networked architecture of genotype spaces and its critical effects on molecular evolution.Open biology · 2018Review
- The architecture of an empirical genotype-phenotype map.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2018Article
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Genome-scale metabolic networks are highly robust to the elimination of enzyme-coding genes. Their structure can evolve rapidly through mutations that eliminate such genes and through horizontal gene transfer that adds new enzyme-coding genes. Using flux balance analysis we study a vast space of metabolic network genotypes and their relationship to metabolic phenotypes, the ability to sustain life in an environment defined by an available spectrum of carbon sources. Two such networks typically differ in most of their reactions and have few essential reactions in common. Our observations suggest that the robustness of the Escherichia coli metabolic network to mutations is typical of networks with the same phenotype. We also demonstrate that networks with the same phenotype form large sets that can be traversed through single mutations, and that single mutations of different genotypes with the same phenotype can yield very different novel phenotypes. This means that the evolutionary plasticity and robustness of metabolic networks facilitates the evolution of new metabolic abilities. Our approach has broad implications for the evolution of metabolic networks, for our understanding of mutational robustness, for the design of antimetabolic drugs, and for metabolic engineering.
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