Metabolic tinker: an online tool for guiding the design of synthetic metabolic pathways.

ABSTRACT: One of the primary aims of synthetic biology is to (re)design metabolic pathways towards the production of desired chemicals. The fast pace of developments in molecular biology increasingly makes it possible to experimentally redesign existing pathways and implement de novo ones in microbes or using in vitro platforms. For such experimental studies, the bottleneck is shifting from implementation of pathways towards their initial design. Here, we present an online tool called 'Metabolic Tinker', which aims to guide the design of synthetic metabolic pathways between any two desired compounds. Given two user-defined 'target' and 'source' compounds, Metabolic Tinker searches for thermodynamically feasible paths in the entire known metabolic universe using a tailored heuristic search strategy.

SUBMITTER: McClymont K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3675468 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature