Fast reconsonstruction of compact context-specific network models

Recent progress in high-throughput data acquisition has shifted the focus from data generation to the processing and understanding of now easily collected patient-specific information. Metabolic models, which have already proven to be very powerful for the integration and analysis of such data sets, might be successfully applied in precision medicine in the near future. Context-specific reconstructions extracted from generic genome-scale models like Reconstruction X (ReconX) (Duarte et al., 2007; Thiele et al., 2013) or Human Metabolic Reconstruction (HMR) (Agren et al., 2012; Mardinoglu et al., 2014a) thereby have the potential to become a diagnostic and treatment tool tailored to the analysis of specific groups of individuals. The use of computational algorithms as a tool for the routinely diagnosis and analysis of metabolic diseases requires a high level of predictive power, robustness and sensitivity. Although multiple context-specific reconstruction algorithms were published in the last ten years, only a fraction of them is suitable for model building based on human high-throughput data. Beside other reasons, this might be due to problems arising from the limitation to only one metabolic target function or arbitrary thresholding. The aim of this thesis was to create a family of robust and fast algorithms for the building of context-specific models that could be used for the integration of different types of omics data and which should be sensitive enough to be used in the framework of precision medicine. FASTCORE (Vlassis et al., 2014), which was developed in the frame of this thesis is among the first context-specific building algorithms that do not optimize for a biological function and that has a computational time around seconds. Furthermore, FASTCORE is devoid of heuristic parameter settings. FASTCORE requires as input a set of reactions that are known to be active in the context of interest (core reactions) and a genome-scale reconstruction. FASTCORE uses