The global integrative network: integration of signaling and metabolic pathways

The crosstalk between signaling and metabolic pathways has been known to play key roles in human diseases and plant biological processes. The integration of signaling and metabolic pathways can provide an essential reference framework for crosstalk analysis. However, current databases use distinct structures to present signaling and metabolic pathways, which leads to the chaos in the integrated networks. Moreover, for the metabolic pathways, the metabolic enzymes and the reactions are disconnected by the current widely accepted layout of edges and nodes, which hinders the topological analysis of the integrated networks. Here, we propose a novel “meta-pathway” structure, which uses the uniformed structure to display the signaling and metabolic pathways, and resolves the difficulty in linking the metabolic enzymes to the reactions topologically. We compiled a comprehensive collection of global integrative networks (GINs) by merging the meta-pathways of 7077 species. We demonstrated the assembly of the signaling and metabolic pathways using the GINs of four species—human, mouse, Arabidopsis, and rice. Almost all of the nodes were assembled into one major network for each of the four species, which provided opportunities for robust crosstalk and topological analysis, and knowledge graph construction.