title: PathAligner: metabolic pathway retrieval and alignment.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Analysis of metabolic pathways is a central topic in understanding the relationship between genotype and phenotype. The rapid accumulation of biological data provides the possibility of studying metabolic pathways at both the genomic and the metabolic levels. Retrieving metabolic pathways from current biological data sources, reconstructing metabolic pathways from rudimentary pathway components, and aligning metabolic pathways with each other are major tasks. Our motivation was to develop a conceptual framework and computational system that allows the retrieval of metabolic pathway information and the processing of alignments to reveal the similarities between metabolic pathways.
  
  
  RESULTS
  PathAligner extracts metabolic information from biological databases via the Internet and builds metabolic pathways with data sources of genes, sequences, enzymes, metabolites etc. It provides an easy-to-use interface to retrieve, display and manipulate metabolic information. PathAligner also provides an alignment method to compare the similarity between metabolic pathways.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  PathAligner is available at http://bibiserv.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/pathaligner.
authors.affiliation: Department of Bioinformatics and Medical Informatics, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. mchen@techfak.uni-bielefeld.de
authors.forename: Ming
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Ralf
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hofestädt
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000502:physiology; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D008954:Models, Biological; D020543:Proteome / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism*; D016415:Sequence Alignment / Q000379:methods*; D015398:Signal Transduction / Q000502:physiology*; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface
chemical_list: D020543:Proteome