FindPath: a Matlab solution for in silico design of synthetic metabolic pathways

Abstract

SUMMARY: Several methods and computational tools have been developed to design novel metabolic pathways. A major challenge is evaluating the metabolic efficiency of the designed pathways in the host organism. Here we present FindPath, a unified system to predict and rank possible pathways according to their metabolic efficiency in the cellular system. This tool uses a chemical reaction database to generate possible metabolic pathways and exploits constraint-based models (CBMs) to identify the most efficient synthetic pathway to achieve the desired metabolic function in a given host microorganism. FindPath can be used with common tools for CBM manipulation and uses the standard SBML format for both input and output files. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: http://metasys.insa-toulouse.fr/software/findpath/. CONTACT: heux@insa-toulouse.fr SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.