Comparisons Between Different Methods in Measuring Enzyme Similarity for Metabolic Network Alignment

ABSTRACT

Metabolic network alignments enable comparison of the similarities and differences between pathways in two metabolic networks and help to uncover the conserved sub-blocks therein. Such analysis is important in the understanding of metabolic networks and species evolution. The fundamental parts of metabolic network alignment algorithms all involve comparisons of the similarity between two enzymes as a similarity measure of network nodes. As a result, the study of methods for measuring enzyme similarity becomes highly relevant. Currently, two approaches are mainly used to measure enzyme similarity. One of the methods is based on similarity measures of gene or protein sequences; the other is based on enzyme classification. In this study, multiple metabolic network alignments were performed using both the methods. The results showed that, in general, the sequence similarity method yielded higher accuracy, especially with respect to reflecting evolutionary distances.