MetNet: A two-level approach to reconstructing and comparing metabolic networks

Metabolic pathway comparison and interaction between different species can detect important information for drug engineering and medical science. In the literature, proposals for reconstructing and comparing metabolic networks present two main problems: network reconstruction requires usually human intervention to integrate information from different sources and, in metabolic comparison, the size of the networks leads to a challenging computational problem. We propose to automatically reconstruct a metabolic network on the basis of KEGG database information. Our proposal relies on a two-level representation of the huge metabolic network: the first level is graph-based and depicts pathways a…