James J Kelley1, Shay Maor1, Min Kyung Kim1, Anatoliy Lane1, Desmond S Lun1,2. 1. Department of Computer Science, Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Rutgers University, Camden, NJ 08102, USA. 2. Department of Plant Biology and Pathology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA.
Abstract
SUMMARY: Visualization of metabolites, reactions and pathways in genome-scale metabolic networks (GEMs) can assist in understanding cellular metabolism. Three attributes are desirable in software used for visualizing GEMs: (i) automation, since GEMs can be quite large; (ii) production of understandable maps that provide ease in identification of pathways, reactions and metabolites; and (iii) visualization of the entire network to show how pathways are interconnected. No software currently exists for visualizing GEMs that satisfies all three characteristics, but MOST-Visualization, an extension of the software package MOST (Metabolic Optimization and Simulation Tool), satisfies (i), and by using a pre-drawn overview map of metabolism based on the Roche map satisfies (ii) and comes close to satisfying (iii). AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MOST is distributed for free on the GNU General Public License. The software and full documentation are available at http://most.ccib.rutgers.edu/. CONTACT: dslun@rutgers.edu. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
SUMMARY: Visualization of metabolites, reactions and pathways in genome-scale metabolic networks (GEMs) can assist in understanding cellular metabolism. Three attributes are desirable in software used for visualizing GEMs: (i) automation, since GEMs can be quite large; (ii) production of understandable maps that provide ease in identification of pathways, reactions and metabolites; and (iii) visualization of the entire network to show how pathways are interconnected. No software currently exists for visualizing GEMs that satisfies all three characteristics, but MOST-Visualization, an extension of the software package MOST (Metabolic Optimization and Simulation Tool), satisfies (i), and by using a pre-drawn overview map of metabolism based on the Roche map satisfies (ii) and comes close to satisfying (iii). AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: MOST is distributed for free on the GNU General Public License. The software and full documentation are available at http://most.ccib.rutgers.edu/. CONTACT: dslun@rutgers.edu. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.