In this report, a genome-scale reconstruction of Bacillus subtilis metabolism and its iterative development based on the combination of genomic, biochemical, and physiological information and high-throughput phenotyping experiments is presented. The initial reconstruction was converted into an in silico model and expanded in a four-step iterative fashion. First, network gap analysis was used to identify 48 missing reactions that are needed for growth but were not found in the genome annotation. Second, the computed growth rates under aerobic conditions were compared with high-throughput phenotypic screen data, and the initial in silico model could predict the outcomes qualitatively in 140 of 271 cases considered. Detailed analysis of the incorrect predictions resulted in the addition of 75 reactions to the initial reconstruction, and 200 of 271 cases were correctly computed. Third, in silico computations of the growth phenotypes of knock-out strains were found to be consistent with experimental observations in 720 of 766 cases evaluated. Fourth, the integrated analysis of the large-scale substrate utilization and gene essentiality data with the genomescale metabolic model revealed the requirement of 80 specific enzymes (transport, 53; intracellular reactions, 27) that were not in the genome annotation. Subsequent sequence analysis resulted in the identification of genes that could be putatively assigned to 13 intracellular enzymes. The final reconstruction accounted for 844 open reading frames and consisted of 1020 metabolic reactions and 988 metabolites. Hence, the in silico model can be used to obtain experimentally verifiable hypothesis on the metabolic functions of various genes.Bacillus subtilis has been the organism of choice for the production of several important industrial products, including antibiotics, enzymes, nucleosides, and vitamins. Several aspects of the biochemistry, genetics, and physiology of B. subtilis have been studied extensively making B. subtilis the best characterized prokaryote second only to Escherichia coli (1, 2). In addition various "-omics" data sets such as transcriptomic (3), proteomic (4), and metabolomic (5) are available for B. subtilis. This wealth of experimental data enables the development of a genome-scale metabolic in silico model that can be used not only for quantitative interpretation and structured integration of such extensive data sets but also as a tool for hypothesis generation and engineering of B. subtilis metabolism.To date, constraint-based reconstruction and analysis (COBRA) 4 of cellular metabolism has been employed successfully to develop organism-specific genome-scale in silico models that have enabled numerous applications (6). Unlike other modeling strategies such as kinetic (7), stochastic (8), and cybernetic (9) methods, the COBRA approach does not attempt to compute precisely what a biochemical network does; rather, it seeks to distinguish between the network states that are achievable from those that are not, based on a detailed reconstruction of...

Biological data from high-throughput technologies describing the network components (genes, proteins, metabolites) and their associated interactions have driven the reconstruction and study of structural (topological) properties of large-scale biological networks. In this article, we address the relation of the functional and structural properties by using extensively experimentally validated genome-scale metabolic network models to compute observable functional states of a microorganism and compare the "structure versus function" attributes of metabolic networks. It is observed that, functionally speaking, the essentiality of reactions in a node is not correlated with node connectivity as structural analyses of other biological networks have suggested. These findings are illustrated with the analysis of the genome-scale biochemical networks of three species with distinct modes of metabolism. These results also suggest fundamental differences among different biological networks arising out of their representation and functional constraints.