MetaKnogic-Alpha: A Hyper-Relational Knowledge Base for Grounded Metabolic Reasoning

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Authors: Pengtao Dang, Paveethran Swaminathan, Tingbo Guo, Changlin Wan, Sha Cao, Chi Zhang
Cited by: 0
References: 29

Abstract

Abstract The exponential trajectory of biomedical literature has precipitated a fundamental “synthesis gap” in metabolic research, where critical mechanistic insights remain fragmented across hundreds of thousands of disjointed full-text articles, preventing the consolidation of a global mechanistic view. Here, we present MetaKnogic-Alpha , a foundational mechanistic knowledge substrate designed to bridge this gap by transforming unstructured literature into a navigable, logic-based resource. MetaKnogic-Alpha synthesizes over 100K full-text articles into a hyper-relational hypergraph structure, preserving the n-ary relational logic inherent in complex metabolic pathways. To ensure biological rigor, we implemented a hierarchical discovery protocol: an autonomous reasoning agent first enriches query nomenclature for domain-specific precision, followed by a multi-hop topological expansion within the hypergraph to surface functional neighbors, such as enzymatic co-factors and distal regulators, often lost in traditional search paradigms. Crucially, the system subjects all literature-derived insights to a deterministic biochemical grounding against a curated metabolic reaction network, significantly mitigating the risk of probabilistic hallucinations common in standalone generative models. In rigorous benchmarking, MetaKnogic-Alpha achieved a mechanistic accuracy of 0.98 in scenarios where supporting evidence was present, providing a robustly attributable audit trail back to the primary literature via PubMed Central Identifiers. We designate this primary release as “alpha” to establish the foundational architectural logic for a burgeoning million-scale resource. By compressing the synthesis of thousands of papers from a multi-month manual effort into several hours of automated discovery, MetaKnogic-Alpha serves as a high-fidelity research companion that augments the human expert’s ability to resolve complex metabolic interactions and identify novel therapeutic drivers in precision oncology.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks Microbial Metabolic Engineering and Bioproduction

Publication details

Journal / source
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
Publication date
9 February 2026
Language
EN
Document type
Preprint