Bioinformatics analysis of mycoplasma metabolism: important enzymes, metabolic similarities, and redundancy.

In this work we apply a bioinformatics approach to determine the most important enzymes of the metabolic network of mycoplasmas. The genomes of several mycoplasmas shared predicted important enzymes. Our method allows us to determine both enzymes that are isolated from the metabolic network of the organism and those that are redundant. We also compare the similarities of the mycoplasmas metabolic networks with the phylogenetic relationships predicted from their 16s rRNA sequences.