Steuer Ralf
University Potsdam, Insitute of Physics, Am Neuen Palais 10, Haus 19, 14469 Potsdam, Germany.
Brief Bioinform. 2006 Jun;7(2):151-8. doi: 10.1093/bib/bbl009. Epub 2006 May 11.
A remarkable inherent feature of cellular metabolism is that the concentrations of a small but significant number of metabolites are strongly correlated when measurements of biological replicates are performed. This review seeks to summarize the recent efforts to elucidate the origin of these observed correlations and points out several aspects concerning their interpretation. It is argued that correlations between metabolites differ profoundly from their transcriptomic and proteomic counterparts, and a straightforward interpretation in terms of the underlying biochemical pathways will unavoidably fail. It is demonstrated that the comparative correlations analysis offers a way to exploit the observed correlations to obtain additional information about the physiological state of the system.
细胞代谢一个显著的固有特征是，在进行生物重复测量时，少量但数量可观的代谢物浓度之间存在强相关性。本综述旨在总结近期为阐明这些观察到的相关性的起源所做的努力，并指出有关其解释的几个方面。文中指出，代谢物之间的相关性与转录组学和蛋白质组学中的相关性有很大不同，基于潜在生化途径的直接解释必然会失败。结果表明，比较相关性分析提供了一种利用观察到的相关性来获取有关系统生理状态的额外信息的方法。
