438247 Compartmentalized Metabolic Network Reconstruction to Determine the Effect of the Agricultural Intervention of Soils Ecosystems from a Colombian Natural PARK Located in the Andes Mountains

Wednesday, September 16, 2015
Crowne Plaza Heidelberg City Centre
Maria Camila Alvarez-Silva1, María Mercedes Zambrano2, Johana Husserl3, Jorge M. Gomez4, Silvia Restrepo5 and Andrés González4,6, (1)Chemical Engineering,, Universidad de los Andes, bogota, Colombia, (2)CORPOGEN, Bogotá, Colombia, (3)Department of Civil Engineering,, Universidad de los Andes, bogota, Colombia, (4)Chemical Engineering, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, (5)Department of Biological Sciences, Laboratorio de Micología y Fitopatología (LAMFU), Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia, (6)Grupo de Diseño de Productos y Procesos

COMPARTMENTALIZED METABOLIC NETWORK RECONSTRUCTION TO DETERMINE THE EFFECT OF THE AGRICULTURAL INTERVENTION OF SOILS ECOSYSTEMS FROM A COLOMBIAN NATURAL PARK LOCATED IN THE ANDES MOUNTAINS

María Camila Álvarez Silva1, María Mercedes Zambrano Eder2, Johana Husserl3, Silvia Restrepo4, Jorge Mario Gómez1, Andrés Fernando González Barrios1

1Grupo de Diseño de Productos y Procesos (GDPP), Department of Chemical Engineering,

Universidad de los Andes. Bogotá Colombia

{as.maria10, jorgomez, andgonza} @uniandes.edu.co

2Corporación Corpogen. Bogotá Colombia

mzambrano@corpogen.org

3Centro de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Ambiental. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá  Colombia

jhusserl@uniandes.edu.co

4Department of Biological Sciences. Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia

srestrep@uniandes.edu.co

ABSTRACT

The soil microbial communities are responsible for a wide range of ecological and economic processes. They play a key role in regulating the global biogeochemical cycles, influencing the agricultural productivity, plant and animal diversity, and earth's climate changes. Determining the metabolic processes performed by microbial communities is important for understanding and controlling ecosystem properties. Metagenomic approach allows the explanation of the main metabolic processes that determine the performance of the communities under different environmental conditions. In this study we developed a compartmentalized metabolic network, to conduct a metagenomic comparison between two soil microbial communities from a Colombian natural park located in the Andes mountains. This metagenomic comparative analysis allowed the in silico evaluation of the effect of soil agricultural intervention through an integrated bioinformatic approach, that considered topological properties, taxonomic, and metabolic profiles and a Flux Balance Analysis (FBA) to characterize the microbial ecosystems of  soils  intervened and no intervened by agricultural processes. This model gives specific information about the ecosystems that is generally overlooked in non-compartmentalized networks, provides more accurate results of the fluxes used to optimize the metabolic processes within the network. The Flux Balance Analysis and the metabolic and taxonomic profiles showed that the agricultural intervention of soils could affect the metabolic capability of the ecosystems to regulate the biogeochemical cycles. Results also showed that the nitrogen cycle plays a key role in both ecosystems, since more species are associated with it and the ability to activate import metabolic pathways. Topological analysis showed that the metabolic networks in metagenomic scale conserve the main structural properties of metabolic networks in genomic scale and that the agricultural intervention of soils and the presence of compartments into the models do not affect the global topological features of the networks significantly.

Key words: Metagenomic reconstruction, metabolic network compartmentalization, Flux Balance Analysis, network topology, taxonomic profile, agricultural intervention.


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