BioMiner -: modeling, analyzing, and visualizing biochemical pathways and networks

Motivation: Understanding the biochemistry of a newly sequenced organism is an essential task for post-genomic analysis. Since, however, genome and array data grow much faster than biochemical information, it is necessary to infer reactions by comparative analysis. No integrated and easy to use software tool for this purpose exists as yet. Results: We present a new software system-BioMiner-for analyzing and visualizing biochemical pathways and networks. BioMiner is based on a new comprehensive, extensible and reusable data model-BioCore-which can be used to model biochemical pathways and networks. As a first application we present PathFinder, a new tool predicting biochemical pathways by comparing groups of related organisms based on sequence similarity. We successfully tested PathFinder with a number of experiments, e.g. the well studied glycolysis in bacteria. Additionally, an application called PathViewer for the visualization of metabolic networks is presented. PathViewer is the first application we are aware of which supports the graphical comparison of metabolic networks of different organisms. .