Allylic hydroxylation of triterpenoids by a plant cytochrome P450 triggers key chemical transformations that produce a variety of bitter compounds.

Cucurbitacins are highly oxygenated triterpenoids characteristic of plants in the family Cucurbitaceae and responsible for the bitter taste of these plants. Fruits of bitter melon (Momordica charantia) contain various cucurbitacins possessing an unusual ether bridge between C5 and C19, not observed in other Cucurbitaceae members. Using a combination of next-generation sequencing and RNA-Seq analysis and gene-to-gene co-expression analysis with the ConfeitoGUIplus software, we identified three P450 genes, CYP81AQ19, CYP88L7, and CYP88L8, expected to be involved in cucurbitacin biosynthesis. CYP81AQ19 co-expression with cucurbitadienol synthase in yeast resulted in the production of cucurbita-5,24-diene-3ß,23α-diol. A mild acid treatment of this compound resulted in an isomerization of the C23-OH group to C25-OH with the concomitant migration of a double bond, suggesting that a nonenzymatic transformation may account for the observed C25-OH in the majority of cucurbitacins found in plants. The functional expression of CYP88L7 resulted in the production of hydroxylated C19 as well as C5-C19 ether-bridged products. A plausible mechanism for the formation of the C5-C19 ether bridge involves C7 and C19 hydroxylations, indicating a multifunctional nature of this P450. On the other hand, functional CYP88L8 expression gave a single product, a triterpene diol, indicating a monofunctional P450 catalyzing the C7 hydroxylation. Our findings of the roles of several plant P450s in cucurbitacin biosynthesis reveal that an allylic hydroxylation is a key enzymatic transformation that triggers subsequent processes to produce structurally diverse products.

Metabolic disassembler for understanding and predicting the biosynthetic units of natural products.

BACKGROUND: Natural products are the source of various functional materials such as medicines, and understanding their biosynthetic pathways can provide information that is helpful for their effective production through the synthetic biology approach. A number of studies have aimed to predict biosynthetic pathways from their chemical structures in a retrosynthesis manner; however, sometimes the calculation finishes without reaching the starting material from the target molecule. In order to address this problem, the method to find suitable starting materials is required. RESULTS: In this study, we developed a predictive workflow named the Metabolic Disassembler that automatically disassembles the target molecule structure into relevant biosynthetic units (BUs), which are the substructures that correspond to the starting materials in the biosynthesis pathway. This workflow uses a biosynthetic unit library (BUL), which contains starting materials, key intermediates, and their derivatives. We obtained the starting materials from the KEGG PATHWAY database, and 765 BUs were registered in the BUL. We then examined the proposed workflow to optimize the combination of the BUs. To evaluate the performance of the proposed Metabolic Disassembler workflow, we used 943 molecules that are included in the secondary metabolism maps of KEGG PATHWAY. About 95.8% of them (903 molecules) were correctly disassembled by our proposed workflow. For comparison, we also implemented a genetic algorithm-based workflow, and found that the accuracy was only about 52.0%. In addition, for 90.7% of molecules, our workflow finished the calculation within one minute. CONCLUSIONS: The Metabolic Disassembler enabled the effective disassembly of natural products in terms of both correctness and computational time. It also outputs automatically highlighted color-coded substructures corresponding to the BUs to help users understand the calculation results. The users do not have to specify starting molecules in advance, and can input any target molecule, even if it is not in databases. Our workflow will be very useful for understanding and predicting the biosynthesis of natural products.

Simultaneous prediction of enzyme orthologs from chemical transformation patterns for de novo metabolic pathway reconstruction.

MOTIVATION: Metabolic pathways are an important class of molecular networks consisting of compounds, enzymes and their interactions. The understanding of global metabolic pathways is extremely important for various applications in ecology and pharmacology. However, large parts of metabolic pathways remain unknown, and most organism-specific pathways contain many missing enzymes. RESULTS: In this study we propose a novel method to predict the enzyme orthologs that catalyze the putative reactions to facilitate the de novo reconstruction of metabolic pathways from metabolome-scale compound sets. The algorithm detects the chemical transformation patterns of substrate-product pairs using chemical graph alignments, and constructs a set of enzyme-specific classifiers to simultaneously predict all the enzyme orthologs that could catalyze the putative reactions of the substrate-product pairs in the joint learning framework. The originality of the method lies in its ability to make predictions for thousands of enzyme orthologs simultaneously, as well as its extraction of enzyme-specific chemical transformation patterns of substrate-product pairs. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method by applying it to some ten thousands of metabolic compounds, and analyze the extracted chemical transformation patterns that provide insights into the characteristics and specificities of enzymes. The proposed method will open the door to both primary (central) and secondary metabolism in genomics research, increasing research productivity to tackle a wide variety of environmental and public health matters. CONTACT: : maskot@bio.titech.ac.jp.

Metabolome-scale de novo pathway reconstruction using regioisomer-sensitive graph alignments.

MOTIVATION: Recent advances in mass spectrometry and related metabolomics technologies have enabled the rapid and comprehensive analysis of numerous metabolites. However, biosynthetic and biodegradation pathways are only known for a small portion of metabolites, with most metabolic pathways remaining uncharacterized. RESULTS: In this study, we developed a novel method for supervised de novo metabolic pathway reconstruction with an improved graph alignment-based approach in the reaction-filling framework. We proposed a novel chemical graph alignment algorithm, which we called PACHA (Pairwise Chemical Aligner), to detect the regioisomer-sensitive connectivities between the aligned substructures of two compounds. Unlike other existing graph alignment methods, PACHA can efficiently detect only one common subgraph between two compounds. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms previous descriptor-based methods or existing graph alignment-based methods in the enzymatic reaction-likeness prediction for isomer-enriched reactions. It is also useful for reaction annotation that assigns potential reaction characteristics such as EC (Enzyme Commission) numbers and PIERO (Enzymatic Reaction Ontology for Partial Information) terms to substrate-product pairs. Finally, we conducted a comprehensive enzymatic reaction-likeness prediction for all possible uncharacterized compound pairs, suggesting potential metabolic pathways for newly predicted substrate-product pairs.

Identification of Enzyme Genes Using Chemical Structure Alignments of Substrate-Product Pairs.

Although there are several databases that contain data on many metabolites and reactions in biochemical pathways, there is still a big gap in the numbers between experimentally identified enzymes and metabolites. It is supposed that many catalytic enzyme genes are still unknown. Although there are previous studies that estimate the number of candidate enzyme genes, these studies required some additional information aside from the structures of metabolites such as gene expression and order in the genome. In this study, we developed a novel method to identify a candidate enzyme gene of a reaction using the chemical structures of the substrate-product pair (reactant pair). The proposed method is based on a search for similar reactant pairs in a reference database and offers ortholog groups that possibly mediate the given reaction. We applied the proposed method to two experimentally validated reactions. As a result, we confirmed that the histidine transaminase was correctly identified. Although our method could not directly identify the asparagine oxo-acid transaminase, we successfully found the paralog gene most similar to the correct enzyme gene. We also applied our method to infer candidate enzyme genes in the mesaconate pathway. The advantage of our method lies in the prediction of possible genes for orphan enzyme reactions where any associated gene sequences are not determined yet. We believe that this approach will facilitate experimental identification of genes for orphan enzymes.

DINIES: drug-target interaction network inference engine based on supervised analysis.

DINIES (drug-target interaction network inference engine based on supervised analysis) is a web server for predicting unknown drug-target interaction networks from various types of biological data (e.g. chemical structures, drug side effects, amino acid sequences and protein domains) in the framework of supervised network inference. The originality of DINIES lies in prediction with state-of-the-art machine learning methods, in the integration of heterogeneous biological data and in compatibility with the KEGG database. The DINIES server accepts any 'profiles' or precalculated similarity matrices (or 'kernels') of drugs and target proteins in tab-delimited file format. When a training data set is submitted to learn a predictive model, users can select either known interaction information in the KEGG DRUG database or their own interaction data. The user can also select an algorithm for supervised network inference, select various parameters in the method and specify weights for heterogeneous data integration. The server can provide integrative analyses with useful components in KEGG, such as biological pathways, functional hierarchy and human diseases. DINIES (http://www.genome.jp/tools/dinies/) is publicly available as one of the genome analysis tools in GenomeNet.

Metabolome-scale prediction of intermediate compounds in multistep metabolic pathways with a recursive supervised approach.

MOTIVATION: Metabolic pathway analysis is crucial not only in metabolic engineering but also in rational drug design. However, the biosynthetic/biodegradation pathways are known only for a small portion of metabolites, and a vast amount of pathways remain uncharacterized. Therefore, an important challenge in metabolomics is the de novo reconstruction of potential reaction networks on a metabolome-scale. RESULTS: In this article, we develop a novel method to predict the multistep reaction sequences for de novo reconstruction of metabolic pathways in the reaction-filling framework. We propose a supervised approach to learn what we refer to as 'multistep reaction sequence likeness', i.e. whether a compound-compound pair is possibly converted to each other by a sequence of enzymatic reactions. In the algorithm, we propose a recursive procedure of using step-specific classifiers to predict the intermediate compounds in the multistep reaction sequences, based on chemical substructure fingerprints/descriptors of compounds. We further demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method on the prediction of enzymatic reaction networks from a metabolome-scale compound set and discuss characteristic features of the extracted chemical substructure transformation patterns in multistep reaction sequences. Our comprehensively predicted reaction networks help to fill the metabolic gap and to infer new reaction sequences in metabolic pathways. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Materials are available for free at http://web.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/supp/kot/ismb2014/

Large-Scale Prediction of Beneficial Drug Combinations Using Drug Efficacy and Target Profiles.

The identification of beneficial drug combinations is a challenging issue in pharmaceutical and clinical research toward combinatorial drug therapy. In the present study, we developed a novel computational method for large-scale prediction of beneficial drug combinations using drug efficacy and target profiles. We designed an informative descriptor for each drug-drug pair based on multiple drug profiles representing drug-targeted proteins and Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical Classification System codes. Then, we constructed a predictive model by learning a sparsity-induced classifier based on known drug combinations from the Orange Book and KEGG DRUG databases. Our results show that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in terms of the accuracy of high-confidence predictions, and the extracted features are biologically meaningful. Finally, we performed a comprehensive prediction of novel drug combinations for 2,639 approved drugs, which predicted 142,988 new potentially beneficial drug-drug pairs. We showed several examples of successfully predicted drug combinations for a variety of diseases.

Supervised de novo reconstruction of metabolic pathways from metabolome-scale compound sets.

MOTIVATION: The metabolic pathway is an important biochemical reaction network involving enzymatic reactions among chemical compounds. However, it is assumed that a large number of metabolic pathways remain unknown, and many reactions are still missing even in known pathways. Therefore, the most important challenge in metabolomics is the automated de novo reconstruction of metabolic pathways, which includes the elucidation of previously unknown reactions to bridge the metabolic gaps. RESULTS: In this article, we develop a novel method to reconstruct metabolic pathways from a large compound set in the reaction-filling framework. We define feature vectors representing the chemical transformation patterns of compound-compound pairs in enzymatic reactions using chemical fingerprints. We apply a sparsity-induced classifier to learn what we refer to as 'enzymatic-reaction likeness', i.e. whether compound pairs are possibly converted to each other by enzymatic reactions. The originality of our method lies in the search for potential reactions among many compounds at a time, in the extraction of reaction-related chemical transformation patterns and in the large-scale applicability owing to the computational efficiency. In the results, we demonstrate the usefulness of our proposed method on the de novo reconstruction of 134 metabolic pathways in Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG). Our comprehensively predicted reaction networks of 15 698 compounds enable us to suggest many potential pathways and to increase research productivity in metabolomics. AVAILABILITY: Softwares are available on request. Supplementary material are available at http://web.kuicr.kyoto-u.ac.jp/supp/kot/ismb2013/.

WURCS: the Web3 unique representation of carbohydrate structures.

In recent years, the Semantic Web has become the focus of life science database development as a means to link life science data in an effective and efficient manner. In order for carbohydrate data to be applied to this new technology, there are two requirements for carbohydrate data representations: (1) a linear notation which can be used as a URI (Uniform Resource Identifier) if needed and (2) a unique notation such that any published glycan structure can be represented distinctively. This latter requirement includes the possible representation of nonstandard monosaccharide units as a part of the glycan structure, as well as compositions, repeating units, and ambiguous structures where linkages/linkage positions are unidentified. Therefore, we have developed the Web3 Unique Representation of Carbohydrate Structures (WURCS) as a new linear notation for representing carbohydrates for the Semantic Web.

GENIES: gene network inference engine based on supervised analysis.

Gene network inference engine based on supervised analysis (GENIES) is a web server to predict unknown part of gene network from various types of genome-wide data in the framework of supervised network inference. The originality of GENIES lies in the construction of a predictive model using partially known network information and in the integration of heterogeneous data with kernel methods. The GENIES server accepts any 'profiles' of genes or proteins (e.g. gene expression profiles, protein subcellular localization profiles and phylogenetic profiles) or pre-calculated gene-gene similarity matrices (or 'kernels') in the tab-delimited file format. As a training data set to learn a predictive model, the users can choose either known molecular network information in the KEGG PATHWAY database or their own gene network data. The user can also select an algorithm of supervised network inference, choose various parameters in the method, and control the weights of heterogeneous data integration. The server provides the list of newly predicted gene pairs, maps the predicted gene pairs onto the associated pathway diagrams in KEGG PATHWAY and indicates candidate genes for missing enzymes in organism-specific metabolic pathways. GENIES (http://www.genome.jp/tools/genies/) is publicly available as one of the genome analysis tools in GenomeNet.

Drug target prediction using adverse event report systems: a pharmacogenomic approach.

MOTIVATION: Unexpected drug activities derived from off-targets are usually undesired and harmful; however, they can occasionally be beneficial for different therapeutic indications. There are many uncharacterized drugs whose target proteins (including the primary target and off-targets) remain unknown. The identification of all potential drug targets has become an important issue in drug repositioning to reuse known drugs for new therapeutic indications. RESULTS: We defined pharmacological similarity for all possible drugs using the US Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) adverse event reporting system (AERS) and developed a new method to predict unknown drug-target interactions on a large scale from the integration of pharmacological similarity of drugs and genomic sequence similarity of target proteins in the framework of a pharmacogenomic approach. The proposed method was applicable to a large number of drugs and it was useful especially for predicting unknown drug-target interactions that could not be expected from drug chemical structures. We made a comprehensive prediction for potential off-targets of 1874 drugs with known targets and potential target profiles of 2519 drugs without known targets, which suggests many potential drug-target interactions that were not predicted by previous chemogenomic or pharmacogenomic approaches. AVAILABILITY: Softwares are available upon request. CONTACT: yamanishi@bioreg.kyushu-u.ac.jp SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Datasets and all results are available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~yyamanishi/aers/.

Modular architecture of metabolic pathways revealed by conserved sequences of reactions.

The metabolic network is both a network of chemical reactions and a network of enzymes that catalyze reactions. Toward better understanding of this duality in the evolution of the metabolic network, we developed a method to extract conserved sequences of reactions called reaction modules from the analysis of chemical compound structure transformation patterns in all known metabolic pathways stored in the KEGG PATHWAY database. The extracted reaction modules are repeatedly used as if they are building blocks of the metabolic network and contain chemical logic of organic reactions. Furthermore, the reaction modules often correspond to traditional pathway modules defined as sets of enzymes in the KEGG MODULE database and sometimes to operon-like gene clusters in prokaryotic genomes. We identified well-conserved, possibly ancient, reaction modules involving 2-oxocarboxylic acids. The chain extension module that appears as the tricarboxylic acid (TCA) reaction sequence in the TCA cycle is now shown to be used in other pathways together with different types of modification modules. We also identified reaction modules and their connection patterns for aromatic ring cleavages in microbial biodegradation pathways, which are most characteristic in terms of both distinct reaction sequences and distinct gene clusters. The modular architecture of biodegradation modules will have a potential for predicting degradation pathways of xenobiotic compounds. The collection of these and many other reaction modules is made available as part of the KEGG database.

Drug side-effect prediction based on the integration of chemical and biological spaces.

Drug side-effects, or adverse drug reactions, have become a major public health concern and remain one of the main causes of drug failure and of drug withdrawal once they have reached the market. Therefore, the identification of potential severe side-effects is a challenging issue. In this paper, we develop a new method to predict potential side-effect profiles of drug candidate molecules based on their chemical structures and target protein information on a large scale. We propose several extensions of kernel regression model for multiple responses to deal with heterogeneous data sources. The originality lies in the integration of the chemical space of drug chemical structures and the biological space of drug target proteins in a unified framework. As a result, we demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed method on the simultaneous prediction of 969 side-effects for approved drugs from their chemical substructure and target protein profiles and show that the prediction accuracy consistently improves owing to the proposed regression model and integration of chemical and biological information. We also conduct a comprehensive side-effect prediction for uncharacterized drug molecules stored in DrugBank and confirm interesting predictions using independent information sources. The proposed method is expected to be useful at many stages of the drug development process.

PathPred: an enzyme-catalyzed metabolic pathway prediction server.

The KEGG RPAIR database is a collection of biochemical structure transformation patterns, called RDM patterns, and chemical structure alignments of substrate-product pairs (reactant pairs) in all known enzyme-catalyzed reactions taken from the Enzyme Nomenclature and the KEGG PATHWAY database. Here, we present PathPred (http://www.genome.jp/tools/pathpred/), a web-based server to predict plausible pathways of muti-step reactions starting from a query compound, based on the local RDM pattern match and the global chemical structure alignment against the reactant pair library. In this server, we focus on predicting pathways for microbial biodegradation of environmental compounds and biosynthesis of plant secondary metabolites, which correspond to characteristic RDM patterns in 947 and 1397 reactant pairs, respectively. The server provides transformed compounds and reference transformation patterns in each predicted reaction, and displays all predicted multi-step reaction pathways in a tree-shaped graph.

MUCHA: multiple chemical alignment algorithm to identify building block substructures of orphan secondary metabolites.

BACKGROUND: In contrast to the increasing number of the successful genome projects, there still remain many orphan metabolites for which their synthesis processes are unknown. Metabolites, including these orphan metabolites, can be classified into groups that share the same core substructures, originated from the same biosynthetic pathways. It is known that many metabolites are synthesized by adding up building blocks to existing metabolites. Therefore, it is proposed that, for any given group of metabolites, finding the core substructure and the branched substructures can help predict their biosynthetic pathway. There already have been many reports on the multiple graph alignment techniques to find the conserved chemical substructures in relatively small molecules. However, they are optimized for ligand binding and are not suitable for metabolomic studies. RESULTS: We developed an efficient multiple graph alignment method named as MUCHA (Multiple Chemical Alignment), specialized for finding metabolic building blocks. This method showed the strength in finding metabolic building blocks with preserving the relative positions among the substructures, which is not achieved by simply applying the frequent graph mining techniques. Compared with the combined pairwise alignments, this proposed MUCHA method generally reduced computational costs with improving the quality of the alignment. CONCLUSIONS: MUCHA successfully find building blocks of secondary metabolites, and has a potential to complement to other existing methods to reconstruct metabolic networks using reaction patterns.

Drug-target interaction prediction from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in an integrated framework.

MOTIVATION: In silico prediction of drug-target interactions from heterogeneous biological data is critical in the search for drugs and therapeutic targets for known diseases such as cancers. There is therefore a strong incentive to develop new methods capable of detecting these potential drug-target interactions efficiently. RESULTS: In this article, we investigate the relationship between the chemical space, the pharmacological space and the topology of drug-target interaction networks, and show that drug-target interactions are more correlated with pharmacological effect similarity than with chemical structure similarity. We then develop a new method to predict unknown drug-target interactions from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data on a large scale. The proposed method consists of two steps: (i) prediction of pharmacological effects from chemical structures of given compounds and (ii) inference of unknown drug-target interactions based on the pharmacological effect similarity in the framework of supervised bipartite graph inference. The originality of the proposed method lies in the prediction of potential pharmacological similarity for any drug candidate compounds and in the integration of chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in a unified framework. In the results, we make predictions for four classes of important drug-target interactions involving enzymes, ion channels, GPCRs and nuclear receptors. Our comprehensively predicted drug-target interaction networks enable us to suggest many potential drug-target interactions and to increase research productivity toward genomic drug discovery. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Datasets and all prediction results are available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~yyamanishi/pharmaco/. AVAILABILITY: Softwares are available upon request.

Network-based analysis and characterization of adverse drug-drug interactions.

Co-administration of multiple drugs may cause adverse effects, which are usually known but sometimes unknown. Package inserts of prescription drugs are supposed to contain contraindications and warnings on adverse interactions, but such information is not necessarily complete. Therefore, it is becoming more important to provide health professionals with a comprehensive view on drug-drug interactions among all the drugs in use as well as a computational method to identify potential interactions, which may also be of practical value in society. Here we extracted 1,306,565 known drug-drug interactions from all the package inserts of prescription drugs marketed in Japan. They were reduced to 45,180 interactions involving 1352 drugs (active ingredients) identified by the D numbers in the KEGG DRUG database, of which 14,441 interactions involving 735 drugs were linked to the same drug-metabolizing enzymes and/or overlapping drug targets. The interactions with overlapping targets were further classified into three types: acting on the same target, acting on different but similar targets in the same protein family, and acting on different targets belonging to the same pathway. For the rest of the extracted interaction data, we attempted to characterize interaction patterns in terms of the drug groups defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification system, where the high-resolution network at the D number level is progressively reduced to a low-resolution global network. Based on this study we have developed a drug-drug interaction retrieval system in the KEGG DRUG database, which may be used for both searching against known drug-drug interactions and predicting potential interactions.

Improvement of the Structure Generator DAECS with Respect to Structural Diversity.

The development of novel organic compounds with desired properties is time consuming and costly. Thus, the quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) model is used widely for efficiently discovering compounds with the desired properties. Novel structures can be generated from a variety of input structures in silico by structure generators. We previously developed the structure generator DAECS to yield highly active drug-like structures. However, the structural diversity of the structures generated by DAECS was still small for practical applications such as drug discovery. In this paper, we present structure modification rules and the algorithm to output more diverse structures through the DAECS workflow. Two new types of structural modification rules, bond contraction and ring mergence, were added. The new algorithm, which restricts the search area and subsequently clusters structures on a two-dimensional map generated by generative topographic mapping, was implemented for the repetitive selection of seed structures. A case study was conducted to evaluate our method using ligand structures for the histamine H1 receptor. The results showed improved structural diversity than the previous method.

E-zyme: predicting potential EC numbers from the chemical transformation pattern of substrate-product pairs.

MOTIVATION: The IUBMB's Enzyme Nomenclature system, commonly known as the Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers, plays key roles in classifying enzymatic reactions and in linking the enzyme genes or proteins to reactions in metabolic pathways. There are numerous reactions known to be present in various pathways but without any official EC numbers, most of which have no hope to be given ones because of the lack of the published articles on enzyme assays. RESULTS: In this article we propose a new method to predict the potential EC numbers to given reactant pairs (substrates and products) or uncharacterized reactions, and a web-server named E-zyme as an application. This technology is based on our original biochemical transformation pattern which we call an 'RDM pattern', and consists of three steps: (i) graph alignment of a query reactant pair (substrates and products) for computing the query RDM pattern, (ii) multi-layered partial template matching by comparing the query RDM pattern with template patterns related with known EC numbers and (iii) weighted major voting scheme for selecting appropriate EC numbers. As the result, cross-validation experiments show that the proposed method achieves both high coverage and high prediction accuracy at a practical level, and consistently outperforms the previous method. AVAILABILITY: The E-zyme system is available at http://www.genome.jp/tools/e-zyme/.