ArticleGenome biology and evolution2009
Abundant indispensable redundancies in cellular metabolic networks.
Article in Genome biology and evolution, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Reconstituting alternative life using the test-bed of cell-free systems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- High enzyme promiscuity in lignin degradation mechanisms inApplied and environmental microbiology · 2025Article
- Understanding flux switching in metabolic networks through an analysis of synthetic lethals.NPJ systems biology and applications · 2024Article
- The unique catalytic properties of PSAT1 mediate metabolic adaptation to glutamine blockade.Nature metabolism · 2024Article
- Nuclear envelope budding and its cellular functions.Nucleus (Austin, Tex.) · 2023Article
- Transposon insertional mutagenesis of diverse yeast strains suggests coordinated gene essentiality polymorphisms.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Genetic buffering and potentiation in metabolism.PLoS computational biology · 2020Article
- Patterns and Mechanisms of Diminishing Returns from Beneficial Mutations.Molecular biology and evolution · 2019Article
- Alleles of a gene differ in pleiotropy, often mediated through currency metabolite production, in E. coli and yeast metabolic simulations.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Understanding the evolution of functional redundancy in metabolic networks.Bioinformatics (Oxford, England) · 2018Article
- Control of primary metabolism by a virulence regulatory network promotes robustness in a plant pathogen.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Evolutionary adaptations to new environments generally reverse plastic phenotypic changes.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Interdependence of Primary Metabolism and Xenobiotic Mitigation Characterizes the Proteome of Bjerkandera adusta during Wood Decomposition.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2018Article
- The three-legged stool of understanding metabolism: integrating metabolomics with biochemical genetics and computational modeling.AIMS microbiology · 2018Article
- Information theory, evolutionary innovations and evolvability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Comprehensive Analysis of Tissue-wide Gene Expression and Phenotype Data Reveals Tissues Affected in Rare Genetic Disorders.Cell systems · 2017Article
- The Electron Bifurcating FixABCX Protein Complex from Azotobacter vinelandii: Generation of Low-Potential Reducing Equivalents for Nitrogenase Catalysis.Biochemistry · 2017Article
- The potential for non-adaptive origins of evolutionary innovations in central carbon metabolism.BMC systems biology · 2016Article
- The In Vitro Redundant Enzymes PurN and PurT Are Both Essential for Systemic Infection of Mice in Salmonella enterica Serovar Typhimurium.Infection and immunity · 2016Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cellular life is a highly redundant complex system; yet, the evolutionary maintenance of the redundancy remains unexplained. Using a systems biology approach, we infer that 37-47% of metabolic reactions in Escherichia coli and yeast can be individually removed without blocking the production of any biomass component under any nutritional condition. However, the majority of these redundant reactions are preserved because they have differential maximal efficiencies at different conditions or their loss causes an immediate fitness reduction that can only be regained via mutation, drift, and selection in evolution. The remaining redundancies are attributable to pleiotropic effects or recent horizontal gene transfers. We find that E. coli and yeast exhibit opposite relationships between the functional importance and redundancy level of a reaction, which is inconsistent with the conjecture that redundancies are preserved as an adaptation to back up important parts in the system. Interestingly, the opposite relationships can both be recapitulated by a simple model in which the natural environments of the organisms change frequently. Thus, adaptive backup is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain the high redundancy of cellular metabolic networks. Taken together, our results strongly suggest that redundant reactions are not kept as backups and that the genetic robustness of metabolic networks is an evolutionary by-product.
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