Reconstruction and topological analysis of metabolic network in the bovine rumen tissue

The rumen has a central role in production efficiency in ruminants. Understanding metabolism process of rumen tissue can improve production efficiency of ruminants. In the present work, the metabolic network in the rumen tissue of cattle was reconstructed using genome information and available knowledge of rumen tissue from BRENDA, KEGG, Uniprot and NCBI. The result of reconstruct network consisted of 410 enzymes, 1429 metabolites as nodes and 1771 reactions they take part as edges. The characteristics of the metabolite-centric network were analyzed using some plugins in Cytoscape software. The top 15 hub metabolites were determined. The result of search in KEGG pathway shown the most of hub metabolites include CoA, Acetyl-CoA, D-fructose-6-phosphate, ubiquinone, succinate, electron-transferring flavoprotein, pyruvate, tetrahydrofolate and 2-oxoglutarate, involved in reactions which participate in metabolic pathway. Also, the genes CPT2, CPT1A, CPT1B, CPT1C (EC 2.3.1.21), ETFDH (EC 2.3.1.41), GPAM, GPAT4, GPAT3, GPAT2 (EC 2.3.1.15) participate in fatty acid metabolism that genes associated with this pathway may be essential to improve meat production efficiency of cattle research. The degree distribution of network follow power-law distribution hence displays a scale-free property. The average path length was 13.142 and diameter was 38 that shows the network also has small world properties. The present work is the first study to reconstruct rumen tissue network that may provide information to greater understanding on metabolic potential of rumen. Hub metabolites in scale-free networks paly significant role in maintaining topological robustness, for this reason seem to be useful for bovine breeding researches.