Chen Ming, Hofestaedt Ralf
Group of Bioinformatics, College of Life Science, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
In Silico Biol. 2005;5(2):111-28.
Metabolic pathway alignment represents one of the most powerful tools for comparative analysis of metabolism. It involves recognition of metabolites common to a set of functionally-related metabolic pathways, interpretation of biological evolution processes and determination of alternative metabolic pathways. Moreover, it is of assistance in function prediction and metabolism modeling. Although research on genomic sequence alignment is extensive, the problem of aligning metabolic pathways has received less attention. We are motivated to develop an algorithm of metabolic pathway alignment to reveal the similarities between metabolic pathways. A new definition of the metabolic pathway is introduced. The algorithm has been implemented into the PathAligner system; its web-based interface is available at http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/pathaligner/.
代谢途径比对是代谢比较分析中最强大的工具之一。它涉及识别一组功能相关代谢途径共有的代谢物，解释生物进化过程以及确定替代代谢途径。此外，它有助于功能预测和代谢建模。尽管对基因组序列比对的研究广泛，但代谢途径比对问题受到的关注较少。我们有动力开发一种代谢途径比对算法，以揭示代谢途径之间的相似性。引入了代谢途径的新定义。该算法已在PathAligner系统中实现；其基于网络的界面可在http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/pathaligner/获取。
