title: BioSynther: a customized biosynthetic potential explorer.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  One of the most promising applications of biosynthetic methods is to produce chemical products of high value from the ready-made chemicals. To explore the biosynthetic potentials of a chemical as a synthesis precursor, biosynthetic databases and related chemoinformatics tools are urgently needed. In the present work, a web-based tool, BioSynther, is developed to explore the biosynthetic potentials of precursor chemicals using BKM-react, Rhea, and more than 50,000 in-house RxnFinder reactions manually curated. BioSynther allows researchers to explore biosynthetic potentials, through so far known biochemical reactions, step by step interactively, which could be used as a useful tool in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology.
  
  
  METHODS
  BioSynther is available at: http://www.lifemodules.org/BioSynther/.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  hu_qn@tib.cas.cn.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Combinatorial Biosynthesis and Drug Discovery (Wuhan University), Ministry of Education, and Wuhan University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wuhan 430071, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Weizhong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Tu
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering (Wuhan University) and Wuhan University School of Computer Sciences, Wuhan 430072, People's Republic of China and.
authors.forename: Haoran
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering (Wuhan University) and Wuhan University School of Computer Sciences, Wuhan 430072, People's Republic of China and.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Combinatorial Biosynthesis and Drug Discovery (Wuhan University), Ministry of Education, and Wuhan University School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Wuhan 430071, People's Republic of China, Key Laboratory of Systems Microbial Biotechnology, Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianjin, People's Republic of China.
authors.forename: Qian-Nan
authors.initials: QN
authors.lastname: Hu
mesh_terms: D001547:Benzaldehydes / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism; D001669:Biochemical Phenomena; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D062126:Databases, Chemical; D006801:Humans; D060847:Metabolic Engineering / Q000379:methods*; D053858:Metabolic Networks and Pathways; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D001547:Benzaldehydes; C100058:vanillin