Preliminary Reconstruction Of High Quality Metabolic Network Of Bacillus Subtilis

Building a metabolic reaction database of high quality for a microorganism is the basis of both quantitative analysis of metabolic network and melioration of bacteria species with metabolic engineering technologies as well as embodiment of systems biology wholly analyzing microorganism from microscopical point of view. The main reconstruction method is to complement and cure existing databases or reconstruct a new one by combining information from the Internet databases, text books, literature, patents as well as experimental facts.Bacillus subtilis is a gram positive model organism widely used in industrially and medial studies. However, up to now the high quality metabolic network of B. subtilist is still not available. Therefore, we aim at Bacillus subtilis and collect genome annotation and metabolic reaction information from three authoritative Internet databases: KEGG, Subtilist and Expasy. Based on KEGG, we make the three databases complement each other by programming with VBA, and finally construct a new metabolic reaction database of Bacillus subtilis, whose number of metabolic genes increases from 791 in KEGG to 840. Then the whole database has been divided into seven subsystems for convenient quantitative analysis of the metabolic network: glycolysis and aromatic amino acid metabolism, citrate cycle, glutamate metabolism, aspartate metabolism, histidine metabolism, tetrahydrofolate and riboflavin metabolism, nucleic acid metabolism and lipid metabolism. Up to now, we have already checked parts of the information for supplements and errors according to metabolic pathways in KEGG as well as plotting the nucleic acid pathway maps, via which we can complement and revise the new database.