Browsing by Author "Silva-Andrade, Claudia"

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    A machine-learning approach for predicting butyrate production by microbial consortia using metabolic network information
    (2025) Silva-Andrade, Claudia; Hernández, Sergio; Saa Higuera, Pedro; Pérez-Rueda, Ernesto; Garrido Cortés, Daniel; Martin, Alberto J.
    Understanding the behavior of microbial consortia is crucial for predicting metabolite production by microorganisms. Genome-scale network reconstructions enable the computation of metabolic interactions and specific associations within microbial consortia underpinning the production of different metabolites. In the context of the human gut, butyrate is a central metabolite produced by bacteria that plays a key role within the gut microbiome impacting human health. Despite its importance, there is a lack of computational methods capable of predicting its production as a function of the consortium composition. Here, we present a novel machine-learning approach leveraging automatically generated genome-scale metabolic models to tackle this limitation. Briefly, all consortia made of two up to 13 members from a pool of 19 bacteria with known genomes, including at least one butyrate producer from a pool of three known producer species, were built and their (maximum) in silico butyrate production simulated. Using network-derived descriptors from each bacteria, butyrate production by the above consortia was used as training data for various machine learning models. The performance of the algorithms was evaluated using k-fold cross-validation and new experimental data, displaying a Pearson correlation coefficient exceeding 0.75 for the predicted and observed butyrate production in two bacteria consortia. While consortia with more than two bacteria showed generally worse predictions, the best machine-learning models still outperformed predictions from genome-scale metabolic models alone. Overall, this approach provides a valuable tool and framework for probing promising butyrate-producing consortia on a large scale, guiding experimentation, and more importantly, predicting metabolic production by consortia.
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    Using metabolic networks to predict cross-feeding and competition interactions between microorganisms
    (2024) Silva-Andrade, Claudia; Rodriguez-Fernández, María; Garrido, Daniel; Martin, Alberto J. M.; Jensen, Paul A.
    Understanding the interactions between microorganisms and their impact on bacterial behavior at the community level is a key research topic in microbiology. Different methods, relying on experimental or mathematical approaches based on the diverse properties of bacteria, are currently employed to study these interactions. Recently, the use of metabolic networks to understand the interactions between bacterial pairs has increased, highlighting the relevance of this approach in characterizing bacteria. In this study, we leverage the representation of bacteria through their metabolic networks to build a predictive model aimed at reducing the number of experimental assays required for designing bacterial consortia with specific behaviors. Our novel method for predicting cross-feeding or competition interactions between pairs of microorganisms utilizes metabolic network features. Machine learning classifiers are employed to determine the type of interaction from automatically reconstructed metabolic networks. Several algorithms were assessed and selected based on comprehensive testing and careful separation of manually compiled data sets obtained from literature sources. We used different classification algorithms, including K Nearest Neighbors, XGBoost, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest, tested different parameter values, and implemented several data curation approaches to reduce the biological bias associated with our data set, ultimately achieving an accuracy of over 0.9. Our method holds substantial potential to advance the understanding of community behavior and contribute to the development of more effective approaches for consortia design.