MitoMouse is a model reconstruction of murine mitochondrial metabolism

Abstract

Mitochondria, apart from being the powerhouses of our cells, are key players in cellular metabolism and homeostasis. As a consequence, the core bioenergetics and metabolism of mitochondria are well studied considering the role that dysregulated mitochondrial metabolism plays in disease. Flux Balance Analysis, used in conjunction with metabolic model reconstructions is a powerful computational tool that predicts metabolism. The resulting quantitative descriptions of metabolic dysregulation not only allows current hypotheses to be tested in silico, but can also lead to novel model driven hypotheses that can be experimentally verified. Several metabolic reconstructions for human and mouse metabolism exist, but no model specific to mouse mitochondrial metabolism exists. Here, we have created a mouse-specific mitochondrial metabolic model, mitoMouse, which is based on the high-quality human MitoCore mode. MitoMouse contains 390 genes and 445 metabolites involved in 560 unique reactions, is able to model central carbon metabolism and has been extended to contain reduction of the CoQ complex of Oxidative Phosphorylation by the enzyme DHODH. MitoMOuse was validated to accurately model the important metabolic switch involving CoQ reduction resulting from increased malate import, as recently shown in mouse cardiac tissue. We expect this model to be of immense interest and relevance to researchers working on murine mitochondrial metabolism.