Human Reconstruction 2. What images does that title conjure up in your mind? Frankenstein is one possibility (he was sewn together or 'reconstructed' from dead body parts). But no, guess again. Surgery? Wax museums? Dolly Parton and Michael Jackson?While the title may paint a mental picture of scalpels and sutures, the project itself is somewhat more tame (while just as ambitious as building a monster out of corpses).
Mapping human metabolism has the potential to revolutionize medicine the way Google Maps revolutionized vacation planning. But, back up a sec... what is metabolism?
Metabolic Ponderings
Assembly Line O' Enzymes
As per the previous paragraph, there are tens of thousands of chemical reactions going on in the body. All of those reactions have other reactions they depend on to provide chemical raw materials. It's like an assembly line (for an awesome example of this, go here): Chemical 1 participates in reaction A which produces chemical 2 which then participates in reaction B and is converted into chemical 3, and so forth. That "assembly line" could be represented like this:
1 =(A)=> 2 =(B)=> 3
Reactions A and B would generally be catalyzed by proteins in your cells. Chemicals A and B could be many things, such as sucrose (table sugar), water, or crazy-named stuff such as "Undecaprenyl-diphospho-N-acetylmuramoyl-L-alanyl-D-glutamyl-meso-2-6-diaminopimeloyl-D-alanyl-D-alanine" (which is a real thing in bacterial metabolism).
Metabolic Network
Imagine now, that those thousands of proteins in your body are all interconnected based on the chemicals that are passed from one chemical reaction to another. Protein A makes chemical 1 combine with chemical 2 to make chemical 3, and so on, thousands of times, to chemical 2-thousand something (now you see why scientists have to get creative with their naming stuff ... there's a lot of stuff to name). To complicate things even further, different cell types in the human body (liver cells, heart cells, brainy brain cells, etc.) use different "versions" of the metabolic network.
Until now, scientists had no good way of navigating their way around that giant spaghetti bowl of proteins and chemical reactions. They had no good way of knowing that if reaction AAZ didn't produce chemical 398, then downstream reaction BTZ wouldn't have any chemical 592 and so wouldn't work right (made up example). The network was just too complex for anyone to be able to keep straight in their heads.
Recon2
Now you're in a place to understand Human Reconstruction 2 (or Recon2 to close friends). A large group of scientists made a metabolic map for all those hundreds of proteins and chemicals, how they fit together, and which ones are used in each cell type in the human body. It has been referred to as the "Google Maps" of human metabolism because it allows scientists to easily see the connections between all the different participants in the network, just like Google Maps helps users find connections between locations on the earth.
Impact on Medicine
Once researchers can see how things are supposed to fit together in human metabolism, they can more easily study, and hopefully fix, problems in those networks. For example, cancer is the result of a malfunctioning metabolism in cancerous cells. Using this new tool, Recon2, it will be more and more possible to fix "metabolic malfunctions" and save lives.
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