PathwaySeeker: Evidence-Grounded AI Reasoning over Organism-Specific Metabolic Networks
PathwaySeeker: Evidence-Grounded AI Reasoning over Organism-Specific Metabolic Networks
Oliveira Monteiro, L. M.; Chowdhury, N. B.; Oostrom, M.; McDermott, J. E.; Stratton, K. G.; Choudhury, S.; Bardhan, J. P.
AbstractMetabolic activity is not an intrinsic property of an organism, but an emergent state shaped by environmental and experimental context. Despite recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multi-omics profiling, current computational frameworks struggle to represent and reason over metabolism in a condition-specific manner. General-purpose AI systems operate on static, public biochemical knowledge, while multi-omics datasets capture dynamic measurements without a structured framework for mechanistic interpretation. As a result, metabolic networks remains analysis remains disconnected from the experimental states that define biological function. Here, we introduce PathwaySeeker, an evidence-grounded AI system for organism-specific metabolic network reasoning. PathwaySeeker reconstructs sample-specific metabolic graphs from integrated proteomic and metabolomic data, fine-tunes an LLM on the resulting graph structure, and verifies each reasoning step against the experimental graph through iterative hypothesis search, an approach we term Oracle-in-the-Loop inference. Every output claim carries explicit evidence provenance, distinguishing experimentally confirmed relationships from biochemically plausible hypotheses requiring validation. We demonstrate the system using multi-omics data from the non-model white-rot fungus Trametes versicolor, where PathwaySeeker recovers branched phenylpropanoid pathways and transparently stratifies confirmed reactions from testable extensions. Post-hoc thermodynamic analysis condition-specific metabolite dynamics support the biological feasibility of the reconstructed routes. By embedding experimental evidence provenance directly into language model-guided metabolic network reasoning, PathwaySeeker enables systematic differentiation between experimentally grounded knowledge and structured hypothesis, bridging frontier AI capabilities with organism-specific experimental evidence.