부산대학교 도서관

Mycoplasma pneumoniae, a threatening pathogen with a minimal genome, is a model organism for bacterial systems biology forwhich substantial experimental information is available.With the goal of understanding the complex interactions underlying its metabolism, we analyzed and characterized themetabolic network of M. pneumoniae in great detail, integrating data fromdifferent omics analyses under a range of conditions into a constraint-based model backbone. Iterating model predictions, hypothesis generation, experimental testing, and model refinement, we accurately curated the network and quantitatively explored the energy metabolism. In contrast to other bacteria, M. pneumoniae uses most of its energy for maintenance tasks instead of growth.We show that in highly linear networks the prediction of flux distributions for different growth times allows analysis of timedependent changes, albeit using a staticmodel. By performing an in silico knock-out study as well as analyzing flux distributions in single and doublemutant phenotypes,we demonstrated that themodel accurately represents the metabolism of M. pneumoniae. The experimentally validated model provides a solid basis for understanding its metabolic regulatory mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]