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Pathway Tools Software
Pathway Tools Bioinformatics Software
Pathway Tools is a comprehensive software package for genome informatics and systems biology; the software is associated with the
BioCyc database collection
and supports several use cases in bioinformatics:
- Development of organism-specific databases
that integrate many
bioinformatics datatypes, including genomes, metabolic pathways,
and regulatory networks.
- Metabolic reconstruction and metabolic-flux modeling using flux-balance analysis.
- Scientific visualization and web publishing of those
organism-specific databases, including:
- Analysis of gene-expression, metabolomics, and multi-omics datasets, including pathway
analysis and painting omics data onto diagrams of the full metabolic network, full regulatory network,
and full genome.
- Comparative genome and pathway analyses.
- Analysis of biological networks:
- Search for routes between specified metabolites
- Find dead-end metabolites
- Identify choke points (potential drug targets) in metabolic networks
Pathway Tools Components
- PathoLogic: Creates a new Pathway/Genome Database (PGDB) containing the predicted metabolic pathways
of an organism, given a Genbank entry as input. Pathways are predicted from the
MetaCyc pathway database.
- Pathway/Genome Navigator: Supports query, visualization, and analysis of PGDBs.
The Navigator powers the BioCyc web site at BioCyc.org.
- MetaFlux: Supports development and execution of metabolic flux models.
- Pathway/Genome Editors: Provide interactive editing capabilities for PGDBs.
Please see the Pathway Tools Overview document
for more details on the capabilities of the software.
Pathway Tools was developed by Peter D. Karp and coworkers at
the Bioinformatics
Research Group at SRI International.
Pathway Tools Availability
Pathway Tools is freely available for research purposes
to academic, non-profit, and government institutions, and is available for a
Pathway Tools Publications
Contributions to Pathway Tools
We solicit contributions of new
functionality to Pathway Tools. This is by no means an exclusive
list, but rather a set of ideas for what might be contributed.
Contributions can be integrated directly into the Pathway Tools build
at SRI, or can be distributed separately by their authors for loading
into Pathway Tools. Pathway Tools source code is available.
Interested? Contact .
- Interface bioinformatics prediction algorithms to Pathway Tools so that predictions
made by these tools can be integrated into a PGDB. Example
predictors could include predictors of protein cellular location, or of
regulatory elements.
- Contribute new comparative capabilities to Pathway Tools.
- Contribute metabolic engineering capabilities to Pathway Tools.
Past Contributors
We gratefully acknowledge the following contributions:
- Development of the
PerlCyc Perl API to Pathway Tools by Lukas Mueller of Boyce Thompson Institute
- Development of the JavaCyc
Java API to Pathway Tools by the TAIR project
- Development of the RCyc
API for the R Project by Tomer Altman of Stanford University
- Development of the SBML output module by Jeremy Zucker of the Broad Institute
Pathway Tools User Group Meetings
Additional Pathway Tools Information
Contact Us
To report software bugs or for other questions, please contact us at
.
Subscribe to the Pathway Tools Mailing List.
Mailing list members receive periodic news and
updates about Pathway Tools, such as announcements regarding new
releases of the software and databases. The mail volume is 1-2 announcements per month.
To subscribe to the Pathway Tools mailing list, send an email to with the word subscribe in the Subject.
To unsubscribe, send an email to with the word unsubscribe in the Subject.
Funding Sources
The development of Pathway Tools is funded by grants R01AI160719 and
1R24GM150703 from the National Institutes of Health;
and by grant NSF2109898 from the National Science Foundadtion.
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