Development of an internet based system for modeling biotin metabolism using Bayesian networks

Biotin is an essential water-soluble vitamin crucial for maintaining normal body functions. The importance of biotin for human health has been under-appreciated but there is plenty of opportunity for future research with great importance for human health. Currently, carrying out predictions of biotin metabolism involves tedious manual manipulations. In this paper, we report the development of BiotinNet, an internet based program that uses Bayesian networks to integrate published data on various aspects of biotin metabolism. Users can provide a combination of values on the levels of biotin related metabolites to obtain the predictions on other metabolites that are not specified. As an inherent feature of Bayesian networks, the uncertainty of the prediction is also quantified and reported to the user. This program enables convenient in silico experiments regarding biotin metabolism, which can help researchers design future experiments while new data can be continuously incorporated.