In the biostatistics group of Margriet Hendriks (UMC Utrecht, Department of Metabolic Diseases) and the
Biosystems Data Analysis group of the UvA a joint NMC postdoc, Tunahan Cakir, has investigated how to infer metabolic networks from metabolomics data. This research is reported in the Metabolomics journal and is the first official
Netherlands Metabolomis Centre ublication:
T. Cakir, M.M.W.B. Hendriks, J.A. Westerhuis and A.K. Smilde; Metabolic network discovery through reverse engineering of metabolome data, Metabolomics, DOI 10.1007/s11306-009—156-4, January 2009.
In an extensive set of simulations (see Figure) different types of perturbations were investigated and combined with different network inference tools. The results showed clearly that some kind of pruning is necessary and the design of the perturbation is important.
