Understanding human metabolic physiology: a genome-to-systems approach

The intricate nature of human physiology renders its study a difficult undertaking, and a systems biology approach is necessary to understand the complex interactions involved. Network reconstruction is a key step in systems biology and represents a common denominator because all systems biology research on a target organism relies on such a representation. With the recent development of genome-scale human metabolic networks, metabolic systems analysis is now possible and has initiated a shift towards human systems biology. Here, we review the important aspects of reconstructing a bottom-up human metabolic network, the network's role in modeling human physiology and the necessity for a community-based consensus reconstruction of human metabolism to be established.