RESEARCH ARTICLE Pan-phylum Comparison of Nematode Metabolic Potential

Nematodes are among the most important causative pathogens of neglected tropical dis-eases. The increased availability of genomic and transcriptomic data for many understudied nematode species provides a great opportunity to investigate different aspects of their biolo-gy. Increasingly, metabolic potential of pathogens is recognized as a critical determinant governing their development, growth and pathogenicity. Comparing metabolic potential among species with distinct trophic ecologies can provide insights on overall biology or mo-lecular adaptations. Furthermore, ascertaining gene expression at pathway level can help in understanding metabolic dynamics over development. Comparison of biochemical path-ways (or subpathways, i.e. pathway modules) among related species can also retrospec-tively indicate potential mistakes in gene-calling and functional annotation. We show with numerous illustrative case studies that comparisons at the level of pathway modules have the potential to uncover biological insights while remaining computationally tractable. Here, we reconstruct and compare metabolic modules found in the deduced proteomes of 13 nematodes and 10 non-nematode species (including hosts of the parasitic nematode spe