title: PathwayAccess: CellDesigner plugins for pathway databases.
abstract: CellDesigner provides a user-friendly interface for graphical biochemical pathway description. Many pathway databases are not directly exportable to CellDesigner models. PathwayAccess is an extensible suite of CellDesigner plugins, which connect CellDesigner directly to pathway databases using respective Java application programming interfaces. The process is streamlined for creating new PathwayAccess plugins for specific pathway databases. Three PathwayAccess plugins, MetNetAccess, BioCycAccess and ReactomeAccess, directly connect CellDesigner to the pathway databases MetNetDB, BioCyc and Reactome. PathwayAccess plugins enable CellDesigner users to expose pathway data to analytical CellDesigner functions, curate their pathway databases and visually integrate pathway data from different databases using standard Systems Biology Markup Language and Systems Biology Graphical Notation.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Implemented in Java, PathwayAccess plugins run with CellDesigner version 4.0.1 and were tested on Ubuntu Linux, Windows XP and 7, and MacOSX. Source code, binaries, documentation and video walkthroughs are freely available at http://vrac.iastate.edu/~jlv.
authors.affiliation: Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Department, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA.
authors.forename: John L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Van Hemert
authors.forename: Julie A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Dickerson
mesh_terms: D016208:Databases, Factual; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D012984:Software