MPW: the Metabolic Pathways Database

The Metabolic Pathwasy Database (MPW) (www.biobase.com/emphome.html/homepage. html.pags/pathways.html) a derivative of EMP (www.biobase.com/EMP) plays a fundamental role in the technology of metabolic reconstructions from sequenced genomes under the PUMA (www.mcs.anl.gov/home/compbio/PUMA/Production/ ReconstructedMetabolism/reconstruction.html), WIT (www.mcs.anl.gov/home/compbio/WIT/wit.html ) and WIT2 (beauty.isdn.msc.anl.gov/WIT2.pub/CGI/user.cgi) systems. In October 1997, it included some 2800 pathway diagrams covering primary and secondary metabolism, membrane transport, signal transduction pathways, intracellular traffic, translation and transcription. In the current public release of MPW (beauty.isdn.mcs.anl.gov/MPW), the encoding is based on the logical structure of the pathways and is represented by the objects commonly used in electronic circuit design. This facilitates drawing and editing the diagrams and makes possible automation of the basic simulation operations such as deriving stoichiometric matrices, rate laws, and, ultimately, dynamic models of metabolic pathways. Individual pathway diagrams, automatically derived from the original ASCII records, are stored as SGML instances supplemented by relational indices. An auxiliary database of compound names and structures, encoded in the SMILES format, is maintained to unambiguously connect the pathways to the chemical structures of their intermediates.