Proposal for metabolic flux pathways comparison

Abstract

Metabolic flux pathway analysis can provide important information for a better understanding of life and all its processes directly benefiting areas like medicine, agronomy, pharmacy and others alike. Some of the main tools used to study and analyze metabolic pathways have been based on the idea of pathway comparison, using graph data structures. Some of those tasks are considered hard computational problems. On the other hand, those comparisons have not yet taken into consideration the metabolic flux as part of the pathway or metabolic process. It means, to consider how much of a metabolite passes through a reaction system over time. We propose here a simple way to compare metabolic pathways using its related flux information by a simple metabolic pathway comparison method introduced in 2017 and adjusting it to weighted graphs. The algorithms analyze the associated weighted graphs of metabolic flux pathways and provide a fast scoring of its flux similarities in the first place and a list of similarities and differences between the given flux pathways, listed as pathways. We provide some insights into the analysis follow to get a good score system when comparing metabolic pathways related weighted graphs in a low-cost computation.