Bioinformatics Advance Access published online on October 7, 2008
Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btn515
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Systems level modeling of cellular glycosylation reaction networks: O-linked glycan formation on natural selectin ligands

1Chemical and Biological Engineering, 2NY State Center for Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260, and 3Cancer Biology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY 14263, USA.
To whom correspondence should be addressed. Dr. Sriram Neelamegham, E-mail: neel{at}eng.buffalo.edu
| Abstract |
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Motivation: The emerging field of Glycomics requires the development of systems based modeling strategies to relate glycosyltransferase gene expression and enzyme activity with carbohydrate structure and function.
Results: We describe the application of object oriented programming concepts to define glycans, enzymes, reactions, pathways and compartments for modeling cellular glycosylation reaction networks. These class definitions are combined with current biochemical knowledge to define potential reaction networks that participate in the formation of the sialyl Lewis-X (sLeX) epitope on O-glycans linked to a leukocyte cell-surface glycoprotein, P-selectin Glycoprotein Ligand-1 (PSGL-1). Subset modeling, hierarchical clustering, principal component analysis and adjoint sensitivity analysis are applied to refine the reaction network and to quantify individual glycosyltransferase rate constants. Wet-lab experiments validate estimates from computer modeling. Such analysis predicts that sLeX expression varies directly with sialyltransferase
2,3ST3Gal-IV expression and inversely with
2,3ST3Gal-I/II.
Availability: SBML files for all converged models are available at http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/~neel/bio_reaction_network.html
Contact: neel{at}eng.buffalo.edu
Supplementary information: Available at Bioinformatics online.
Associate Editor: Prof. Martin Bishop
*Equal contribution to manuscript
Received on July 11, 2008; revised on September 3, 2008; accepted on October 2, 2008