Pathway Tools

Status

• Mature release
• Development: active
• Support: active

Resources

• Home page
• Download
• 2008 Survey

About Pathway Tools

Pathway Tools is a comprehensive symbolic systems biology software system that supports several use cases in bioinformatics and systems biology:

• Development of organism-specific databases called Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs) that integrate many bioinformatics datatypes, from genomes to pathways to regulatory networks.
• Development of metabolic-flux models using flux-balance analysis
• Scientific visualization, web publishing, and dissemination of those organism-specific databases, including:
  • Automatic display of metabolic pathways and full metabolic networks; generation of metabolic map diagram and of metabolic map poster (example).
  • Genome browser; comparative genome browser; generation of genome poster (example).
  • Display of operons, regulons, and full transcriptional regulatory networks
• Analysis of omics datasets, including painting omics data on to diagrams of the full metabolic network, enrichment analysis.
• Computational inferences including prediction of metabolic pathways, prediction of metabolic pathway hole fillers, prediction of operons
• Comparative analyses of model-organism databases.
• Analysis of biological networks:
  • Interactively tracing metabolites through the metabolic network
  • Finding dead-end metabolites in metabolic networks
  • Identifying choke points (potential drug targets) in metabolic networks

Pathway Tools has four components:

• PathoLogic: Creates a new PGDB containing the predicted metabolic pathways of an organism, given a Genbank entry as input.
• Pathway/Genome Navigator: Supports query, visualization, and analysis of PGDBs. The Navigator powers the BioCyc web site at BioCyc.org.
• MetaFlux: Supports development of metabolic flux models from Pathway/Genome Databases.
• Pathway/Genome Editors: Provide interactive editing capabilities for PGDBs.

Visit the Pathway Tools website.

Downloads

• Download Pathway Tools: http://biocyc.org/download.shtml
• Source code is available on execution of software license.

Using Pathway Tools

Start with an annotated genome in the form of a Genbank file; Pathway Tools will do the rest.

Documentation

Documentation is available within the software distribution. For an overview of the tool, see Pathway Tools version 13.0: integrated software for pathway/genome informatics and systems biology

Publications, Tutorials, and Presentations

Publications on or mentioning Pathway Tools

• Pathway Tools version 13.0: integrated software for pathway/genome informatics and systems biology.
• An advanced web query interface for biological databases.
• The pathway tools pathway prediction algorithm.
• Regulatory network operations in the Pathway Tools software.

Tutorials

Pathway Tools slides

General information about Pathway Tools, including slides from tutorials and user guides

Upcoming Events

Pathway Tools tutorials and workshops

Contacts and Mailing Lists

	Mailing List Link	Description	Archive(s)
Pathway Tools	ptools-users@ai.sri.com	Pathway Tools users list. To subscribe to this list, send a request to ptools-support@ai.sri.com.	None

Pathway Tools in the wild

Public installations of Pathway Tools: There are a large number of PGDBs available via the BioCyc website, e.g. the E. coli PGDB, as well as a list of PGDBs hosted elsewhere.

Pathway Tools Development

Development team

Pathway Tools was developed by Peter D. Karp and coworkers at the Bioinformatics Research Group at SRI International.

Current status

The Pathway Tools Developers' Corner has updates and information on current and proposed Pathway Tools developments.

See also

See the samples section of the BioCyc website for details of the types of data that are stored in a PGDB.

More on Pathway Tools

See Category:Pathway Tools

Raw tool data at Pathway Tools/tool data