Complex network perspective on structure and function of Staphylococcus aureus metabolic network

With remarkable advances in reconstruction of genome-scale metabolic networks, uncovering complex network structure and function from these networks is becoming one of the most important topics in system biology. This work aims at studying the structure and function of Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) metabolic network by complex network methods. We first generated a metabolite graph from the recently reconstructed high-quality S. aureus metabolic network model. Then, based on ‘bow tie’ structure character, we explain and discuss the global structure of S. aureus metabolic network. The functional significance, global structural properties, modularity and centrality analysis of giant strong component in S. aureus metabolic networks are studied.