Genome-Scale Reconstruction of C. Elegans Metabolism and Its Application to Age Research

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans was the first sequenced multicellular organism and is also a well known model organism in a broad range of disciplines including developmental biology and age research. Nevertheless, until now, there is no comprehensive reconstruction of C. elegans metabolism available. We used the capabilities for the MetaCyc/Biocyc database and the associated pathway tools software to create not only a SBML model but also a graphical visualiztion of the metabolism of C.
elegans. Furthermore, we used a combination of MADE [1] and iMAT [2], which we call halfMADE to generate context-specific metabolic networks for normal and perturbed aging in C. elegans. The two life extending perturbations lead to similar
changes on global-scale of the metabolism. This suggests the action of a common mechanism by which the life-span extending effects of the perturbations are mediated.

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2.    Zur H, Ruppin E & Shlomi T (2010) iMAT: an integrative metabolic analysis tool. Bioinformatics 26, 3140-3142.