Paley, S. M. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2024

The Comparative Genome Dashboard

The Comparative Genome Dashboard is a web-based software tool for interactive exploration of the similarities and differences in gene functions between organisms. It provides a high-level graphical survey of cellular functions, and enables the user to drill down to examine subsystems of interest in greater detail. At its highest level the Comparative Dashboard contains panels for cellular systems such as biosynthesis, energy metabolism, transport, and response to stimulus. Each panel contains a set of bar graphs that plot the numbers of compounds or gene products for each organism across a set of subsystems of that panel. Users can interactively drill down to focus on subsystems of interest and see grids of compounds produced or consumed by each organism, specific GO term assignments, pathway diagrams, and links to more detailed comparison pages. For example, the dashboard enables users to compare the cofactors that a set of organisms can synthesize, the metal ions that they are able to transport, their DNA damage repair capabilities, their biofilm-formation genes, and their viral response proteins. The dashboard enables users to quickly perform comprehensive comparisons at varying levels of detail.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2021

Plant Metabolic Network: A multi-species resource of plant metabolic information

Plant metabolism is a pillar of our ecosystem, food security, and economy. To understand and engineer plant metabolism, we first need a comprehensive and accurate annotation of all metabolic information across plant species. As a step towards this goal, we previously created the Plant Metabolic Network (PMN), an online resource of curated and computationally predicted information about the enzymes, compounds, reactions, and pathways that make up plant metabolism. Here we report PMN 15, which contains genome-scale metabolic pathway databases of 126 algal and plant genomes, ranging from model organisms to crops to medicinal plants, and new tools for analyzing and viewing metabolism information across species and integrating omics data in a metabolic context. We systematically evaluated the quality of the databases, which revealed that our semi-automated validation pipeline dramatically improves the quality. We then compared the metabolic content across the 126 organisms using multiple correspondence analysis and found that Brassicaceae, Poaceae, and Chlorophyta appeared as metabolically distinct groups. To demonstrate the utility of this resource, we used recently published sorghum transcriptomics data to discover previously unreported trends of metabolism underlying drought tolerance. We also used single-cell transcriptomics data from the Arabidopsis root to infer cell-type specific metabolic pathways. This work shows the continued growth and refinement of the PMN resource and demonstrates its wide-ranging utility in integrating metabolism with other areas of plant biology. One-sentence SummaryThe Plant Metabolic Network is a collection of databases containing experimentally-supported and predicted information about plant metabolism spanning many species.

plant biology↗