Virtual Metabolic Human

The Virtual Metabolic Human (VMH, Noronha et al, 2019, PMID 30371894) is a resource that can explicitly link human metabolism, gut microbiome metabolism, nutrition, and disease. VMH integrates and maintains relations between these entities:

• global reconstruction of human metabolism Recon3 (Brunk et al., 2018, PMID 29457794);
• metabolic reconstructions of gut microbes (Magnúsdóttir et al., 2017, PMID 27893703);
• data for more than 200 metabolic diseases (Sahoo and Thiele, 2013, PMID 23492669);
• dietary information.

Considering the increasing complexity of metabolic networks, tools that enable to interactively visualize metabolic network content and integrate omics data and simulation results are highly desirable. ReconMaps (Noronha et al., 2016, PMID 27993782; Noronha et al, 2019, PMID 30371894) is a collection of manually drawn comprehensive maps, consistent with the content of Recon3, and is available through a web interface that allows content query, visualization of custom datasets and submission of feedback to manual curators. An extension of the Constraint-Based Reconstruction and Analysis (COBRA) toolbox (Heirendt et al., 2019, PMID 30787451) was developed to interact with ReconMap and allows users to directly upload simulation results to ReconMaps.

VMH and ReconMaps can be connected to disease-specific maps, such as the Parkinson’s disease map, thereby enabling investigations beyond metabolic pathways.

	Ines Thiele, PhD National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland Head of the Molecular Systems Physiology Group; the Leader of the Virtual Metabolic Human project; the Leader of the Virtual Metabolic Gut project; the Leader of the Recon3 project
	Ronan Fleming, PhD Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands Head of the Systems Biochemistry Group, Leiden Academic Centre for Drug Research; the Leader of the ReconMap project; the Leader of the COBRA Toolbox project; Coordinator of the H2020 Project - Systems Medicine of Mitochondrial Parkinson’s Disease