Table 2.
Pathway topological analysis showing the human metabolic pathways most significantly affected by acute sore throat disease pathology; the number of metabolites featured in each pathway, and the number of metabolite ‘hits’ are shown, as are the corresponding FDR-corrected p values for these contributions. The Homo sapiens pathway library was selected, which contained a total of 80 pathways. The chosen pathway library code was hsa (KEGG organisms abbreviation). The selected pathway enrichment analysis method and node importance measure for this toplogical analysis were globaltest and relative betweenness centrality, respectively. The ‘betweenness centrality’ determines the shortest path number passing through the node, and this is also employed as an importance measure for metabolites, since in this case the metabolic network is directed. The impact is the pathway impact value, which represents the matched metabolite node cumulative percentage values from all such nodes featured (computed from this pathway topological analysis). As many as 13 other metabolic pathways had FDR-corrected p values lying between 7.18 × 10−11 and 0.045, and these also may be implicated in the pathogenesis of pharyngitis, although less significantly so than those displayed in this Table.
| Metabolic Pathway | Total Metabolites | No. of Hits | FDR | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arginine and proline metabolism | 38 | 2 | 7.94 × 10−39 | 0.09 |
| Alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism |
28 | 4 | 3.38 × 10−34 | 0.31 |
| Cysteine and methionine metabolism | 33 | 1 | 6.94 × 10−13 | 0.00 |
| Glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism |
32 | 4 | 6.94 × 10−13 | 0.11 |
| Histidine metabolism | 16 | 1 | 2.50 × 10−12 | 0.00 |
| Nitrogen metabolism | 6 | 2 | 1.99 × 10−11 | 0.00 |
| Pyruvate metabolism | 22 | 2 | 1.99 × 10−11 | 0.21 |
| Glycolysis/Gluconeogenesis | 26 | 2 | 1.99 × 10−11 | 0.10 |
| Butanoate metabolism | 15 | 2 | 2.27 × 10−11 | 0.00 |
| Glutathione metabolism | 28 | 2 | 7.18 × 10−11 | 0.10 |