An updated genome-scale reconstruction of the metabolic network in Escherichia coli K-12 MG1655 is presented. This updated metabolic reconstruction includes: (1) an alignment with the latest genome annotation and the metabolic content of EcoCyc leading to the inclusion of the activities of 1260 ORFs, (2) characterization and quantification of the biomass components and maintenance requirements associated with growth of E. coli and (3) thermodynamic information for the included chemical reactions. The conversion of this metabolic network reconstruction into an in silico model is detailed. A new step in the metabolic reconstruction process, termed thermodynamic consistency analysis, is introduced, in which reactions were checked for consistency with thermodynamic reversibility estimates. Applications demonstrating the capabilities of the genome-scale metabolic model to predict high-throughput experimental growth and gene deletion phenotypic screens are presented. The increased scope and computational capability using this new reconstruction is expected to broaden the spectrum of both basic biology and applied systems biology studies of E. coli metabolism.

Various technologies can be used to produce genome-scale, or 'omics', data sets that provide systems-level measurements for virtually all types of cellular components in a model organism. These data yield unprecedented views of the cellular inner workings. However, this abundance of information also presents many hurdles, the main one being the extraction of discernable biological meaning from multiple omics data sets. Nevertheless, researchers are rising to the challenge by using omics data integration to address fundamental biological questions that would increase our understanding of systems as a whole.

We applied whole-genome resequencing of Escherichia coli to monitor the acquisition and fixation of mutations that conveyed a selective growth advantage during adaptation to a glycerol-based growth medium. We identified 13 different de novo mutations in five different E. coli strains and monitored their fixation over a 44-d period of adaptation. We obtained proof that the observed spontaneous mutations were responsible for improved fitness by creating single, double and triple site-directed mutants that had growth rates matching those of the evolved strains. The success of this new genome-scale approach indicates that real-time evolution studies will now be practical in a wide variety of contexts.Comparative genomics has been almost entirely focused on genomic changes over long periods of time, on the order of millions of years. A new microarray-based method of whole-genome resequencing called comparative genome sequencing (CGS) 1 now makes it cost efficient to monitor bacterial evolution comprehensively over short time periods as well. This capability is important because many microbial phenomena, such as the emergence of new pathogens and the acquisition of antibiotic resistance factors, can occur over relatively short time scales. Experimental evolution of bacteria and viruses 2,3 is a facile approach to study these topics. It has been used to test predictions of evolutionary theory 4 and to study parallel changes in populations evolved for 20,000 generations 5 , acquisition of antibiotic resistance 1 and in vitro symbiosis 6 . Our laboratory has used experimental evolution as a tool for metabolic engineering 7 and to study the recovery of strains with gene knockouts in central metabolic genes 8 . Nevertheless, much remains unknown about genome plasticity over short evolutionary timescales.It is a common mistake to think of bacteria as static; that is, to assume that a culture grown overnight is the same as it was the day before. It has been estimated that nearly 10% of the individual bacteria in a Salmonella enterica population carry large-scale genome rearrangements 9 , and in a suboptimal environment, selection can alter a population very rapidly. The 10-20 generations that occur in the process of growing a bacterial culture are sufficient to create a heterogeneous population, depending on the magnitude of the selective advantage of adaptive mutations. This problem is avoided by using strains of bacteria that are adapted to common laboratory media, but there are interesting cases where a seemingly straightforward growth medium poses a great challenge to a bacterium.An example is E. coli K-12 grown in minimal medium supplemented with glycerol as the carbon and energy source. Despite a complete pathway for glycerol catabolism, large variations in the growth rates of various strains have been noted 10 . Growth of the sequenced strain MG1655 has been observed to differ from computational predictions based on flux balance analysis 11 . Upon extended logarithmic growth in glycerol minimal medium, the growth rate...

NAFLD is associated with significantly altered circulating BA composition, likely unaffected by type 2 diabetes, and correlated with histological features of NASH; these observations provide the foundation for future hypothesis-driven studies of specific effects of BAs on specific aspects of NASH. (Hepatology 2017).