Líffræðifélag Íslands - biologia.is
Líffræðiráðstefnan 2021

Erindi/veggspjald / Talk/poster E31

Metabolic gene essentiality in the endothelium

Höfundar / Authors: Adrián López García de Lomana (1) & Óttar Rolfsson (1)

Starfsvettvangur / Affiliations: 1. Center for Systems Biology, University of Iceland, Sturlugata 8, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland.

Kynnir / Presenter: Adrián López García de Lomana

The endothelium is a cell monolayer that forms the inner lining of blood and lymphatic vessels. It regulates vital processes including nutrient distribution, inflammation and metastasis. The pivotal role of metabolism in endothelial cell function has been recently spotlighted. Computational metabolic models are useful tools to better understand the physiological implications of metabolic regulation, for example, their analysis resulted in the prediction of clinically relevant metabolic biomarkers in sepsis. Here, we report the computational exploration of metabolic gene essentiality under a large variety of endothelial phenotypes, in an effort towards a better understanding of metabolic regulation. First, we retrieved gene expression from EndoDB, a database that contains more than 4,000 endothelial transcriptome quantifications under a diverse set of conditions. Next, we constrained metabolic flux boundary conditions by gene expression in each particular sample. Lastly, leveraging access to a high-performance computing environment, we predicted metabolic gene essentially on each particular constrained model. A similar approach could be deployed to investigate metabolic vulnerabilities in transcriptionally heterogeneous cell populations. Altogether this catalogue of metabolic vulnerabilities represents an ideal resource for experimental validation before eventually informing clinical applications.