BioSynther: a customized biosynthetic potential explorer

Bioinformatics. 2016 Feb 1;32(3):472-3. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btv599. Epub 2015 Oct 14.

Abstract

Motivation: 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.

Availability and implementation: BioSynther is available at: http://www.lifemodules.org/BioSynther/.

Contact: hu_qn@tib.cas.cn.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Benzaldehydes / chemistry*
  • Benzaldehydes / metabolism
  • Biochemical Phenomena
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Simulation
  • Databases, Chemical*
  • Humans
  • Metabolic Engineering / methods*
  • Metabolic Networks and Pathways*
  • Software*

Substances

  • Benzaldehydes
  • vanillin