Alladi Ramakrishnan Hall

Tissue-specific and gut-community metabolic models to understand infectious and lifestyle diseases

Amit Ghosh

IIT Kharagpur

Metabolic flux analysis in disease biology is opening up new avenues for therapeutic interventions. Numerous diseases lead to disturbance in the metabolic homeostasis and it is becoming increasingly important to be able to quantify the difference in interaction under normal and diseased condition. While genome-scale metabolic models have been used to study those differences, there are limited methods to probe into the differences in flux between these two conditions. Our method of conducting a differential flux analysis can be leveraged to find which reactions are altered between the diseased and normal state. We applied this to study the altered reactions in the case of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Further, we have implemented metabolic flux analysis for an in-depth assessment of the inter-microbial metabolic interaction pattern in gut microbiota in type-2-diabetes (T2D) patient. The model-based analysis of biochemical flux in T2D and healthy gut conditions showed distinct biochemical signatures and diverse metabolic interactions in the microbial community. The flux-level analysis of the microbial community model can provide insights into the metabolic reprogramming in diabetic gut microbiomes, which may be helpful in personalized therapeutics and diet design against T2D.