FindPath: a Matlab solution for in silico design of synthetic metabolic pathways

Bioinformatics. 2014 Oct 15;30(20):2986-8. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btu422. Epub 2014 Jul 3.

Abstract

Summary: Several methods and computational tools have been developed to design novel metabolic pathways. A major challenge is evaluating the metabolic efficiency of the designed pathways in the host organism. Here we present FindPath, a unified system to predict and rank possible pathways according to their metabolic efficiency in the cellular system. This tool uses a chemical reaction database to generate possible metabolic pathways and exploits constraint-based models (CBMs) to identify the most efficient synthetic pathway to achieve the desired metabolic function in a given host microorganism. FindPath can be used with common tools for CBM manipulation and uses the standard SBML format for both input and output files.

Availability and implementation: http://metasys.insa-toulouse.fr/software/findpath/.

Contact: heux@insa-toulouse.fr

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Computational Biology / methods*
  • Computer Simulation*
  • Databases, Factual
  • Metabolic Engineering
  • Metabolic Networks and Pathways*
  • Models, Biological
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / genetics
  • Saccharomyces cerevisiae / metabolism
  • Software