DMPFinder - Finding Differentiating Pathways with Gaps from Two Groups of Metabolic Networks

Why some strains of a species exhibit a certain phenotype (e.g. drug resistant) but not the other strains of the same species is a critical question to answer. Studying the metabolism of the two groups of strains may discover the corresponding pathways that are conserved in the first group but not in the second group. However, only a few tools provide functions to compare two groups of metabolic networks which are usually limited to the reaction level, not the pathway level. In this paper, we formulate the DMP (Differentiating Metabolic Pathway) problem for finding conserved pathways exist in first group, but not the second group. The problem also captures the mutation in pathways and derives a measure (p-value and e-score) for evaluating the confident of the pathways. We then developed an algorithm, DMPFinder, to solve the DMP problem. Experimental results show that DMPFinder is able to identify pathways that are critical for the first group to exhibit a certain phenotype which is absent in the other group. Some of these pathways cannot be identified by other tools which only consider reaction level or do not take into account possible mutations among species. The software is available at: http://i.cs.hku.hk/~alse/hkubrg/projects/DMPFinder/