Estimate The Impact Of Gene Loss In Silico

Question

[qiyunzhu]

Dear all,

We recently studied a group of closely-related bacteria, and found that a few strains lack a crucial housekeeping gene. We were curious how could these guys survive. We wish to evaluate the impact of this certain gene loss on the whole bacterial metabolic pathway. What we are thinking now is that we took a metabolic pathway from KEGG or whatever, locate this gene, take it away and see how the whole network disconnects. However, this manual solution sounds stupid. I wonder if there is a certain solution that is automated and statistically robust to this question? Any hints and recommendations are welcome.

Thank you!