Fig. 2.

Metabolic dissimilarity predicts hierarchy flips in pairs of substrates (A) and representative random walk trajectories (C). Two trajectories are compared for a metabolically similar (glucose and melibiose, A) and dissimilar (glucose and fucose, C) pairs of sugars. (B) and (D) Resource preference trajectories in the same trajectories shown in (A) and (C). (E) A schematic of calculating Jaccard distance in processing metabolic pathways between two sugars. The number of commonly used reactions for processing both two sugars was divided by the total metabolic reactions used to process each sugar (i.e., Jaccard similarity), and this value was subtracted from 1. In this scheme, we show examples in two pairs of sugars. (F) The dissimilarity in metabolic pathway (Jaccard distance) predicts the rank-flip events in 21 pairs of sugars. An orange line shows linear regressions, the error bars indicate ±SEM, and r stands for Pearson's correlations (N = 9,974) with Mantel test (10⁶ permutations).