Meta genome-wide network from functional linkages of genes in human gut microbial ecosystems

The human gut microbial ecosystem (hgme) exerts an important influence on the human health. in recent researches,meta-genomics provided deep insights into the hgme in terms of gene contents,metabolic processes and genome constitutions of meta-genome. here we present a novel methodology to investigate the hgme on the basis of a set of functionally coupled genes regardless of their genome origins when considering the co-evolution properties of genes. by analyzing these coupled genes,we showed some basic properties of hgme significantly associated with each other,and further constructed a protein interaction map of human gut meta-genome to discover some functional modules that may relate with essential metabolic processes. compared with other studies,our method provides a new idea to extract basic function elements from meta-genome systems and investigate complex microbial environment by associating its biological traits with co-evolutionary fingerprints encoded in it. © 2013 bentham science publishers.