Metabolic pathways are fundamental maps in biochemistry that detail how molecules are transformed through various reactions. Metabolomics refers to the large-scale study of small molecules. High-throughput, untargeted, mass spectrometry-based metabolomics experiments typically depend on libraries for structural annotation, which is necessary for pathway analysis. However, only a small fraction of spectra can be matched to known structures in these libraries and only a portion of annotated metabolites can be associated with specific pathways, considering that numerous pathways are yet to be discovered. The complexity of metabolic pathways, where a single compound can play a part in multiple pathways, poses an additional challenge. This study introduces a different concept: mass spectra distribution, which is the empirical distribution of the intensities times their associated m/z values. Analysis of COVID-19 and mouse brain datasets shows that by estimating the differences of the point estimations of these distributions, it becomes possible to infer the metabolic directions and magnitudes without requiring knowledge of the exact chemical structures of these compounds and their related pathways. The overall metabolic momentum map, named as momentome, has the potential to bypass the current bottleneck and provide fresh insights into metabolomics studies. This brief report thus provides a mathematical framing for a classic biological concept.
This work was initially finished two years ago, and later I shared to some professors. I registered the domain, http://directome.org and http://biomathematics.org in January, 2022. It is still ongoing now, and prepared for PNAS. I am introducing this work in YouTube and Quora, if you are interested, please visit: https://www.youtube.com/@Iobiomathematics or https://www.quora.com/profile/Tuobang-Li-1/answers . Also, the manuscript has been deposited in Zenodo, Tuobang Li. (2024). Infer metabolic momentum from moment differences of mass-weighted intensity distributions. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10616979 and https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377974502_Infer_metabolic_directions_from_moment_differences_of_mass-weighted_intensity_distributions
Feel free to share it or contact tl@biomathematics.org, for more materials available by request.
view counts since 2024, February, 8th
