M2R: a Python add-on to cobrapy for modifying human genome-scale metabolic reconstruction using the gut microbiota models.

The gut microbiota is the human body's largest population of microorganisms that interact with human intestinal cells. They use ingested nutrients for fundamental biological processes and have important impacts on human physiology, immunity and metabolome in the gastrointestinal tract. Here, we present M2R, a Python add-on to cobrapy that allows incorporating information about the gut microbiota metabolism models to human genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs) like RECON3D. The idea behind the software is to modify the lower bounds of the exchange reactions in the model using aggregated in- and out-fluxes from selected microbes. M2R enables users to quickly and easily modify the pool of the metabolites that enter and leave the GEM, which is particularly important for those looking into an analysis of the metabolic interaction between the gut microbiota and human cells and its dysregulation. M2R is freely available under an MIT License at https://github.com/e-weglarz-tomczak/m2r. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

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© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press.