Application of CellDesigner program for nutrition planning and food safety control

Abstract

In this work the application of CellDesigner 4.0 (Systems Biology Institute, Tokyo, Japan) for nutrition planning and food safety control was tested using three models: (i) metabolic model of glycolysis, (ii) folate-mediated 1-carbon metabolism and (iii) metabolism of arsenic in human liver. Each model was simulated with a few different initial nutrient concentrations and enzyme activities. After model design and simulations in CellDesigner, it can be concluded that the use of computational tools enable fast and reproducible analysis of different input concentrations and different enzyme activity effects on specific metabolic process in the human organism. Application of computational modelling for nutrient related pathway analysis ensures a detail insight in metabolic process and simple control of the metabolic reaction affected by nutrient intake. Computational approach also simplifies prediction of potential hazards in foods, as demonstrated by metabolism of arsenic example.

Keywords

• celldesigner
• mathematical modelling
• nutrition planning
• food safety