title: BiGG: a Biochemical Genetic and Genomic knowledgebase of large scale metabolic reconstructions.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Genome-scale metabolic reconstructions under the Constraint Based Reconstruction and Analysis (COBRA) framework are valuable tools for analyzing the metabolic capabilities of organisms and interpreting experimental data. As the number of such reconstructions and analysis methods increases, there is a greater need for data uniformity and ease of distribution and use.
  
  
  METHODS
  We describe BiGG, a knowledgebase of Biochemically, Genetically and Genomically structured genome-scale metabolic network reconstructions. BiGG integrates several published genome-scale metabolic networks into one resource with standard nomenclature which allows components to be compared across different organisms. BiGG can be used to browse model content, visualize metabolic pathway maps, and export SBML files of the models for further analysis by external software packages. Users may follow links from BiGG to several external databases to obtain additional information on genes, proteins, reactions, metabolites and citations of interest.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  BiGG addresses a need in the systems biology community to have access to high quality curated metabolic models and reconstructions. It is freely available for academic use at http://bigg.ucsd.edu.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics Program, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California, 92093-0419, USA.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schellenberger
authors.forename: Junyoung O
authors.initials: JO
authors.lastname: Park
authors.forename: Tom M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Conrad
authors.forename: Bernhard Ø
authors.initials: BØ
authors.lastname: Palsson
mesh_terms: D016678:Genome; D023281:Genomics / Q000379:methods*; D051188:Knowledge Bases; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D012984:Software