A pathogen-specific isotope tracing approach reveals metabolic activities and fluxes of intracellular Salmonella.

Pathogenic bacteria proliferating inside mammalian host cells need to rapidly adapt to the intracellular environment. How they achieve this and scavenge essential nutrients from the host has been an open question due to the difficulties in distinguishing between bacterial and host metabolites in situ. Here, we capitalized on the inability of mammalian cells to metabolize mannitol to develop a stable isotopic labeling approach to track Salmonella enterica metabolites during intracellular proliferation in host macrophage and epithelial cells. By measuring label incorporation into Salmonella metabolites with liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), and combining it with metabolic modeling, we identify relevant carbon sources used by Salmonella, uncover routes of their metabolization, and quantify relative reaction rates in central carbon metabolism. Our results underline the importance of the Entner-Doudoroff pathway (EDP) and the phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase for intracellularly proliferating Salmonella. More broadly, our metabolic labeling strategy opens novel avenues for understanding the metabolism of pathogens inside host cells.

hopsy - a methods marketplace for convex polytope sampling in Python.

SUMMARY: Effective collaboration between developers of Bayesian inference methods and users is key to advance our quantitative understanding of biosystems. We here present hopsy, a versatile open-source platform designed to provide convenient access to powerful Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling algorithms tailored to models defined on convex polytopes (CP). Based on the high-performance C++ sampling library HOPS, hopsy inherits its strengths and extends its functionalities with the accessibility of the Python programming language. A versatile plugin-mechanism enables seamless integration with domain-specific models, providing method developers with a framework for testing, benchmarking, and distributing CP samplers to approach real-world inference tasks. We showcase hopsy by solving common and newly composed domain-specific sampling problems, highlighting important design choices. By likening hopsy to a marketplace, we emphasize its role in bringing together users and developers, where users get access to state-of-the-art methods, and developers contribute their own innovative solutions for challenging domain-specific inference problems. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Sources, documentation and a continuously updated list of sampling algorithms are available at https://jugit.fz-juelich.de/IBG-1/ModSim/hopsy, with Linux, Windows and MacOS binaries at https://pypi.org/project/hopsy/.

Rethinking 13C-metabolic flux analysis - The Bayesian way of flux inference.

Metabolic reaction rates (fluxes) play a crucial role in comprehending cellular phenotypes and are essential in areas such as metabolic engineering, biotechnology, and biomedical research. The state-of-the-art technique for estimating fluxes is metabolic flux analysis using isotopic labelling (13C-MFA), which uses a dataset-model combination to determine the fluxes. Bayesian statistical methods are gaining popularity in the field of life sciences, but the use of 13C-MFA is still dominated by conventional best-fit approaches. The slow take-up of Bayesian approaches is, at least partly, due to the unfamiliarity of Bayesian methods to metabolic engineering researchers. To address this unfamiliarity, we here outline similarities and differences between the two approaches and highlight particular advantages of the Bayesian way of flux analysis. With a real-life example, re-analysing a moderately informative labelling dataset of E. coli, we identify situations in which Bayesian methods are advantageous and more informative, pointing to potential pitfalls of current 13C-MFA evaluation approaches. We propose the use of Bayesian model averaging (BMA) for flux inference as a means of overcoming the problem of model uncertainty through its tendency to assign low probabilities to both, models that are unsupported by data, and models that are overly complex. In this capacity, BMA resembles a tempered Ockham's razor. With the tempered razor as a guide, BMA-based 13C-MFA alleviates the problem of model selection uncertainty and is thereby capable of becoming a game changer for metabolic engineering by uncovering new insights and inspiring novel approaches.

One-shot 13 C15 N-metabolic flux analysis for simultaneous quantification of carbon and nitrogen flux.

Metabolic flux is the final output of cellular regulation and has been extensively studied for carbon but much less is known about nitrogen, which is another important building block for living organisms. For the tuberculosis pathogen, this is particularly important in informing the development of effective drugs targeting the pathogen's metabolism. Here we performed 13 C15 N dual isotopic labeling of Mycobacterium bovis BCG steady state cultures, quantified intracellular carbon and nitrogen fluxes and inferred reaction bidirectionalities. This was achieved by model scope extension and refinement, implemented in a multi-atom transition model, within the statistical framework of Bayesian model averaging (BMA). Using BMA-based 13 C15 N-metabolic flux analysis, we jointly resolve carbon and nitrogen fluxes quantitatively. We provide the first nitrogen flux distributions for amino acid and nucleotide biosynthesis in mycobacteria and establish glutamate as the central node for nitrogen metabolism. We improved resolution of the notoriously elusive anaplerotic node in central carbon metabolism and revealed possible operation modes. Our study provides a powerful and statistically rigorous platform to simultaneously infer carbon and nitrogen metabolism in any biological system.

One-shot 13C15N-metabolic flux analysis for simultaneous quantification of carbon and nitrogen flux.

Metabolic flux is the final output of cellular regulation and has been extensively studied for carbon but much less is known about nitrogen, which is another important building block for living organisms. For the tuberculosis pathogen, this is particularly important in informing the development of effective drugs targeting the pathogen's metabolism. Here we performed 13C15N dual isotopic labeling of Mycobacterium bovis BCG steady state cultures, quantified intracellular carbon and nitrogen fluxes and inferred reaction bidirectionalities. This was achieved by model scope extension and refinement, implemented in a multi-atom transition model, within the statistical framework of Bayesian model averaging (BMA). Using BMA-based 13C15N-metabolic flux analysis, we jointly resolve carbon and nitrogen fluxes quantitatively. We provide the first nitrogen flux distributions for amino acid and nucleotide biosynthesis in mycobacteria and establish glutamate as the central node for nitrogen metabolism. We improved resolution of the notoriously elusive anaplerotic node in central carbon metabolism and revealed possible operation modes. Our study provides a powerful and statistically rigorous platform to simultaneously infer carbon and nitrogen metabolism in any biological system.

Practical sampling of constraint-based models: Optimized thinning boosts CHRR performance.

Thinning is a sub-sampling technique to reduce the memory footprint of Markov chain Monte Carlo. Despite being commonly used, thinning is rarely considered efficient. For sampling constraint-based models, a highly relevant use-case in systems biology, we here demonstrate that thinning boosts computational and, thereby, sampling efficiencies of the widely used Coordinate Hit-and-Run with Rounding (CHRR) algorithm. By benchmarking CHRR with thinning with simplices and genome-scale metabolic networks of up to thousands of dimensions, we find a substantial increase in computational efficiency compared to unthinned CHRR, in our examples by orders of magnitude, as measured by the effective sample size per time (ESS/t), with performance gains growing with polytope (effective network) dimension. Using a set of benchmark models we derive a ready-to-apply guideline for tuning thinning to efficient and effective use of compute resources without requiring additional coding effort. Our guideline is validated using three (out-of-sample) large-scale networks and we show that it allows sampling convex polytopes uniformly to convergence in a fraction of time, thereby unlocking the rigorous investigation of hitherto intractable models. The derivation of our guideline is explained in detail, allowing future researchers to update it as needed as new model classes and more training data becomes available. CHRR with deliberate utilization of thinning thereby paves the way to keep pace with progressing model sizes derived with the constraint-based reconstruction and analysis (COBRA) tool set. Sampling and evaluation pipelines are available at https://jugit.fz-juelich.de/IBG-1/ModSim/fluxomics/chrrt.

PolyRound: polytope rounding for random sampling in metabolic networks.

SUMMARY: Random flux sampling is a powerful tool for the constraint-based analysis of metabolic networks. The most efficient sampling method relies on a rounding transform of the constraint polytope, but no available rounding implementation can round all relevant models. By removing redundant polytope constraints on the go, PolyRound simplifies the numerical problem and rounds all the 108 models in the BiGG database without parameter tuning, compared to ∼50% for the state-of-the-art implementation. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The implementation is available on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/csb.ethz/PolyRound. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

HOPS: high-performance library for (non-)uniform sampling of convex-constrained models.

SUMMARY: The C++ library Highly Optimized Polytope Sampling (HOPS) provides implementations of efficient and scalable algorithms for sampling convex-constrained models that are equipped with arbitrary target functions. For uniform sampling, substantial performance gains were achieved compared to the state-of-the-art. The ease of integration and utility of non-uniform sampling is showcased in a Bayesian inference setting, demonstrating how HOPS interoperates with third-party software. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code is available at https://github.com/modsim/hops/, tested on Linux and MS Windows, includes unit tests, detailed documentation, example applications and a Dockerfile. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Communities of Niche-optimized Strains (CoNoS) - Design and creation of stable, genome-reduced co-cultures.

Current bioprocesses for production of value-added compounds are mainly based on pure cultures that are composed of rationally engineered strains of model organisms with versatile metabolic capacities. However, in the comparably well-defined environment of a bioreactor, metabolic flexibility provided by various highly abundant biosynthetic enzymes is much less required and results in suboptimal use of carbon and energy sources for compound production. In nature, non-model organisms have frequently evolved in communities where genome-reduced, auxotrophic strains cross-feed each other, suggesting that there must be a significant advantage compared to growth without cooperation. To prove this, we started to create and study synthetic communities of niche-optimized strains (CoNoS) that consists of two strains of the same species Corynebacterium glutamicum that are mutually dependent on one amino acid. We used both the wild-type and the genome-reduced C1* chassis for introducing selected amino acid auxotrophies, each based on complete deletion of all required biosynthetic genes. The best candidate strains were used to establish several stably growing CoNoS that were further characterized and optimized by metabolic modelling, microfluidic experiments and rational metabolic engineering to improve amino acid production and exchange. Finally, the engineered CoNoS consisting of an l-leucine and l-arginine auxotroph showed a specific growth rate equivalent to 83% of the wild type in monoculture, making it the fastest co-culture of two auxotrophic C. glutamicum strains to date. Overall, our results are a first promising step towards establishing improved biobased production of value-added compounds using the CoNoS approach.

Reversible jump MCMC for multi-model inference in Metabolic Flux Analysis.

MOTIVATION: The validity of model based inference, as used in systems biology, depends on the underlying model formulation. Often, a vast number of competing models is available, that are built on different assumptions, all consistent with the existing knowledge about the studied biological phenomenon. As a remedy for this, Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) facilitates parameter and structural inferences based on multiple models simultaneously. However, in fields where a vast number of alternative, high-dimensional and non-linear models are involved, the BMA-based inference task is computationally very challenging. RESULTS: Here we use BMA in the complex setting of Metabolic Flux Analysis (MFA) to infer whether potentially reversible reactions proceed uni- or bidirectionally, using 13C labeling data and metabolic networks. BMA is applied on a large set of candidate models with differing directionality settings, using a tailored multi-model Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach. The applicability of our algorithm is shown by inferring the in vivo probability of reaction bidirectionalities in a realistic network setup, thereby extending the scope of 13C MFA from parameter to structural inference. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

When a single lineage is not enough: Uncertainty-Aware Tracking for spatio-temporal live-cell image analysis.

MOTIVATION: Microfluidic platforms for live-cell analysis are in dire need of automated image analysis pipelines. In this context, producing reliable tracks of single cells in colonies has proven to be notoriously difficult without manual assistance, especially when image sequences experience low frame rates. RESULTS: With Uncertainty-Aware Tracking (UAT), we propose a novel probabilistic tracking paradigm for simultaneous tracking and estimation of tracking-induced errors in biological quantities derived from live-cell experiments. To boost tracking accuracy, UAT relies on a Bayesian approach which exploits temporal information on growth patterns to guide the formation of lineage hypotheses. A biological study is presented, in which UAT demonstrates its ability to track cells, with comparable to better accuracy than state-of-the-art trackers, while simultaneously estimating tracking-induced errors. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Image sequences and Java executables for reproducing the results are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1299526. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

mycelyso - high-throughput analysis of Streptomyces mycelium live cell imaging data.

BACKGROUND: Streptomycetes are filamentous microorganisms of high biotechnological relevance, especially for the production of antibiotics. In submerged cultures, the productivity of these microorganisms is closely linked to their growth morphology. Microfluidic lab-on-a-chip cultivation systems, coupled with automated time-lapse imaging, generate spatio-temporal insights into the mycelium development of streptomycetes, therewith extending the biotechnological toolset by spatio-temporal screening under well-controlled and reproducible conditions. However, the analysis of the complex mycelial structure formation is limited by the extent of manual interventions required during processing of the acquired high-volume image data. These interventions typically lead to high evaluation times and, therewith, limit the analytic throughput and exploitation of microfluidic-based screenings. RESULTS: We present the tool mycelyso (MYCElium anaLYsis SOftware), an image analysis system tailored to fully automated hyphae-level processing of image stacks generated by time-lapse microscopy. With mycelyso, the developing hyphal streptomycete network is automatically segmented and tracked over the cultivation period. Versatile key growth parameters such as mycelium network structure, its development over time, and tip growth rates are extracted. Results are presented in the web-based exploration tool mycelyso Inspector, allowing for user friendly quality control and downstream evaluation of the extracted information. In addition, 2D and 3D visualizations show temporal tracking for detailed inspection of morphological growth behaviors. For ease of getting started with mycelyso, bundled Windows packages as well as Docker images along with tutorial videos are available. CONCLUSION: mycelyso is a well-documented, platform-independent open source toolkit for the automated end-to-end analysis of Streptomyces image stacks. The batch-analysis mode facilitates the rapid and reproducible processing of large microfluidic screenings, and easy extraction of morphological parameters. The objective evaluation of image stacks is possible by reproducible evaluation workflows, useful to unravel correlations between morphological, molecular and process parameters at the hyphae- and mycelium-levels with statistical power.

Separation of 13C- and 15N-Isotopologues of Amino Acids with a Primary Amine without Mass Resolution by Means of O-Phthalaldehyde Derivatization and Collision Induced Dissociation.

Computational and experimental advances of recent years have culminated in establishing 13C-Metabolic Flux Analysis (13C-MFA) as a routine methodology to unravel the fluxome. As the acronym suggests, 13C-MFA has relied on the relative abundance of 13C-isotopes in metabolites for flux inference, most commonly measured by mass spectrometry. In this manuscript we expand the scope of labeling measurements to the case of simultaneous 13C- and 15N-labeling of amino acids. Analytically, the separation of isotopologues of this metabolite class can only be achieved at resolving power beyond 65,000. In this manuscript we harvest an overlooked property of the collision induced dissociation of amino acid adducts to discern 13C- and 15N- isotopologues of amino acids with a primary amine without separating them in the m/z domain.

A Pareto approach to resolve the conflict between information gain and experimental costs: Multiple-criteria design of carbon labeling experiments.

Science revolves around the best way of conducting an experiment to obtain insightful results. Experiments with maximal information content can be found by computational experimental design (ED) strategies that identify optimal conditions under which to perform the experiment. Several criteria have been proposed to measure the information content, each emphasizing different aspects of the design goal, i.e., reduction of uncertainty. Where experiments are complex or expensive, second sight is at the budget governing the achievable amount of information. In this context, the design objectives cost and information gain are often incommensurable, though dependent. By casting the ED task into a multiple-criteria optimization problem, a set of trade-off designs is derived that approximates the Pareto-frontier which is instrumental for exploring preferable designs. In this work, we present a computational methodology for multiple-criteria ED of information-rich experiments that accounts for virtually any set of design criteria. The methodology is implemented for the case of 13C metabolic flux analysis (MFA), which is arguably the most expensive type among the 'omics' technologies, featuring dozens of design parameters (tracer composition, analytical platform, measurement selection etc.). Supported by an innovative visualization scheme, we demonstrate with two realistic showcases that the use of multiple criteria reveals deep insights into the conflicting interplay between information carriers and cost factors that are not amendable to single-objective ED. For instance, tandem mass spectrometry turns out as best-in-class with respect to information gain, while it delivers this information quality cheaper than the other, routinely applied analytical technologies. Therewith, our Pareto approach to ED offers the investigator great flexibilities in the conception phase of a study to balance costs and benefits.

Stage-specific metabolic features of differentiating neurons: Implications for toxicant sensitivity.

Developmental neurotoxicity (DNT) may be induced when chemicals disturb a key neurodevelopmental process, and many tests focus on this type of toxicity. Alternatively, DNT may occur when chemicals are cytotoxic only during a specific neurodevelopmental stage. The toxicant sensitivity is affected by the expression of toxicant targets and by resilience factors. Although cellular metabolism plays an important role, little is known how it changes during human neurogenesis, and how potential alterations affect toxicant sensitivity of mature vs. immature neurons. We used immature (d0) and mature (d6) LUHMES cells (dopaminergic human neurons) to provide initial answers to these questions. Transcriptome profiling and characterization of energy metabolism suggested a switch from predominantly glycolytic energy generation to a more pronounced contribution of the tricarboxylic acid cycle (TCA) during neuronal maturation. Therefore, we used pulsed stable isotope-resolved metabolomics (pSIRM) to determine intracellular metabolite pool sizes (concentrations), and isotopically non-stationary 13C-metabolic flux analysis (INST 13C-MFA) to calculate metabolic fluxes. We found that d0 cells mainly use glutamine to fuel the TCA. Furthermore, they rely on extracellular pyruvate to allow continuous growth. This metabolic situation does not allow for mitochondrial or glycolytic spare capacity, i.e. the ability to adapt energy generation to altered needs. Accordingly, neuronal precursor cells displayed a higher sensitivity to several mitochondrial toxicants than mature neurons differentiated from them. In summary, this study shows that precursor cells lose their glutamine dependency during differentiation while they gain flexibility of energy generation and thereby increase their resistance to low concentrations of mitochondrial toxicants.

To be certain about the uncertainty: Bayesian statistics for 13 C metabolic flux analysis.

13 C Metabolic Fluxes Analysis (13 C MFA) remains to be the most powerful approach to determine intracellular metabolic reaction rates. Decisions on strain engineering and experimentation heavily rely upon the certainty with which these fluxes are estimated. For uncertainty quantification, the vast majority of 13 C MFA studies relies on confidence intervals from the paradigm of Frequentist statistics. However, it is well known that the confidence intervals for a given experimental outcome are not uniquely defined. As a result, confidence intervals produced by different methods can be different, but nevertheless equally valid. This is of high relevance to 13 C MFA, since practitioners regularly use three different approximate approaches for calculating confidence intervals. By means of a computational study with a realistic model of the central carbon metabolism of E. coli, we provide strong evidence that confidence intervals used in the field depend strongly on the technique with which they were calculated and, thus, their use leads to misinterpretation of the flux uncertainty. In order to provide a better alternative to confidence intervals in 13 C MFA, we demonstrate that credible intervals from the paradigm of Bayesian statistics give more reliable flux uncertainty quantifications which can be readily computed with high accuracy using Markov chain Monte Carlo. In addition, the widely applied chi-square test, as a means of testing whether the model reproduces the data, is examined closer.

Live cell imaging of SOS and prophage dynamics in isogenic bacterial populations.

Almost all bacterial genomes contain DNA of viral origin, including functional prophages or degenerated phage elements. A frequent but often unnoted phenomenon is the spontaneous induction of prophage elements (SPI) even in the absence of an external stimulus. In this study, we have analyzed SPI of the large, degenerated prophage CGP3 (187 kbp), which is integrated into the genome of the Gram-positive Corynebacterium glutamicum ATCC 13032. Time-lapse fluorescence microscopy of fluorescent reporter strains grown in microfluidic chips revealed the sporadic induction of the SOS response as a prominent trigger of CGP3 SPI but also displayed a considerable fraction (∼30%) of RecA-independent SPI. Whereas approx. 20% of SOS-induced cells recovered from this stress and resumed growth, the spontaneous induction of CGP3 always led to a stop of growth and likely cell death. A carbon source starvation experiment clearly emphasized that SPI only occurs in actively proliferating cells, whereas sporadic SOS induction was still observed in resting cells. These data highlight the impact of sporadic DNA damage on the activity of prophage elements and provide a time-resolved, quantitative description of SPI as general phenomenon of bacterial populations.

Visual workflows for 13C-metabolic flux analysis.

MOTIVATION: The precise quantification of intracellular metabolic flow rates is of fundamental importance in bio(techno)logy and medical research. The gold standard in the field is metabolic flux analysis (MFA) with 13C-labeling experiments. 13C-MFA workflows orchestrate several, mainly human-in-the-loop, software applications, integrating them with plenty of heterogeneous information. In practice, this had posed a major practical barrier for evaluating, interpreting and understanding isotopic data from carbon labeling experiments. RESULTS: Graphical modeling, interactive model exploration and visual data analysis are the key to overcome this limitation. We have developed a first-of-its-kind graphical tool suite providing scientists with an integrated software framework for all aspects of 13C-MFA. Almost 30 modules (plug-ins) have been implemented for the Omix visualization software. Several advanced graphical workflows and ergonomic user interfaces support major domain-specific modeling and proofreading tasks. With that, the graphical suite is a productivity enhancing tool and an original educational training instrument supporting the adoption of 13C-MFA applications in all life science fields. AVAILABILITY: The Omix Light Edition is freely available at http://www.omix-visualization.com CONTACT: k.noeh@fz-juelich.de, p.droste@omix-visualization.com SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Vizardous: interactive analysis of microbial populations with single cell resolution.

MOTIVATION: Single cell time-lapse microscopy is a powerful method for investigating heterogeneous cell behavior. Advances in microfluidic lab-on-a-chip technologies and live-cell imaging render the parallel observation of the development of individual cells in hundreds of populations possible. While image analysis tools are available for cell detection and tracking, biologists are still confronted with the challenge of exploring and evaluating this data. RESULTS: We present the software tool Vizardous that assists scientists with explorative analysis and interpretation tasks of single cell data in an interactive, configurable and visual way. With Vizardous, lineage tree drawings can be augmented with various, time-resolved cellular characteristics. Associated statistical moments bridge the gap between single cell and the population-average level. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The software, including documentation and examples, is available as executable Java archive as well as in source form at https://github.com/modsim/vizardous. CONTACT: k.noeh@fz-juelich.de. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Natural isotope correction of MS/MS measurements for metabolomics and (13)C fluxomics.

Fluxomics and metabolomics are crucial tools for metabolic engineering and biomedical analysis to determine the in vivo cellular state. Especially, the application of (13)C isotopes allows comprehensive insights into the functional operation of cellular metabolism. Compared to single MS, tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) provides more detailed and accurate measurements of the metabolite enrichment patterns (tandem mass isotopomers), increasing the accuracy of metabolite concentration measurements and metabolic flux estimation. MS-type data from isotope labeling experiments is biased by naturally occurring stable isotopes (C, H, N, O, etc.). In particular, GC-MS(/MS) requires derivatization for the usually non-volatile intracellular metabolites introducing additional natural isotopes leading to measurements that do not directly represent the carbon labeling distribution. To make full use of LC- and GC-MS/MS mass isotopomer measurements, the influence of natural isotopes has to be eliminated (corrected). Our correction approach is analyzed for the two most common applications; (13)C fluxomics and isotope dilution mass spectrometry (IDMS) based metabolomics. Natural isotopes can have an impact on the calculated flux distribution which strongly depends on the substrate labeling and the actual flux distribution. Second, we show that in IDMS based metabolomics natural isotopes lead to underestimated concentrations that can and should be corrected with a nonlinear calibration. Our simulations indicate that the correction for natural abundance in isotope based fluxomics and quantitative metabolomics is essential for correct data interpretation.