Reconstruction of metabolic network in the bovine mammary gland tissue

Understanding bovine metabolism and its relationship with milk products is important in cow breeding. In the present work, the metabolic network in the mammary gland tissue of cattle was reconstructed with the available bovine genome information using several public datasets from NCBI, Uniprot, and KEGG. The network consisted of 1,743 metabolites named by KEGG compound numbers as nodes and 657 enzymes that catalyzed the corresponding reactions as edges. The characteristics of the network were analyzed. The top 20 hub metabolites were determined, and the mean path length was identified to be 6.52. Moreover, 11 key enzymes with significant changes in expression under the condition of mastitis were identified and analyzed by integrating the microarray expression data of normal and clinical mastitis. Aside from the GATM gene, 10 downregulated enzymes were detected in bovine with mastitis. In addition, many of the identified enzymes were involved in amino acid metabolisms or had a direct connection to amino acid metabolisms. These results indicate that mastitis could affect the expression of enzymes, which is vital in some amino acid metabolisms, resulting in the reduction of milk proteins. The present work provides information that may improve the understanding on bovine milk production and mastitis.