Genome-scale metabolic modeling has emerged as a promising way to study the metabolic alterations underlying cancer by identifying novel drug targets and biomarkers. To date, several computational methods have been developed to integrate high-throughput data with existing human metabolic reconstructions to generate context-specific cancer metabolic models. Despite a number of studies focusing on benchmarking the context-specific algorithms, no quantitative assessment has been made to compare the predictive performance of these methods. Here, we integrated various and different datasets used in previous works to design a quantitative platform to examine functional and consistency performance of several existing genome-scale cancer modeling approaches. Next, we used the results obtained here to develop a method for the reconstruction of context-specific metabolic models. We then compared the predictive power and consistency of networks generated by our method to other computational approaches investigated here. Our results showed a satisfactory performance of the developed method in most of the benchmarks. This benchmarking platform is of particular use in algorithm selection and assessing the performance of newly developed algorithms. More importantly, it can serve as guidelines for designing and developing new methods focusing on weaknesses and strengths of existing algorithms.

Motivation: Integration of different biological networks and data-types has been a major challenge in systems biology. The present study introduces the transcriptional regulated flux balance analysis (TRFBA) algorithm that integrates transcriptional regulatory and metabolic models using a set of expression data for various perturbations. Results: TRFBA considers the expression levels of genes as a new continuous variable and introduces two new linear constraints. The first constraint limits the rate of reaction(s) supported by a metabolic gene using a constant parameter (C) that converts the expression levels to the upper bounds of the reactions. Considering the concept of constraint-based modeling, the second set of constraints correlates the expression level of each target gene with that of its regulating genes. A set of constraints and binary variables was also added to prevent the second set of constraints from overlapping. TRFBA was implemented on Escherichia coli and Saccharomyces cerevisiae models to estimate growth rates under various environmental and genetic perturbations. The error sensitivity to the algorithm parameter was evaluated to find the best value of C. The results indicate a significant improvement in the quantitative prediction of growth in comparison with previously presented algorithms. The robustness of the algorithm to change in the expression data and the regulatory network was tested to evaluate the effect of noisy and incomplete data. Furthermore, the use of added constraints for perturbations without their gene expression profile demonstrates that these constraints can be applied to improve the growth prediction of FBA. Availability and Implementation: TRFBA is implemented in Matlab software and requires COBRA toolbox. Source code is freely available at http://sbme.modares.ac.ir . Contact: : [email protected]. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.