Summary II- The Database KEGG and Scoring Biochemical Pathways

In this summary, I describe two topics on the subject of biochemical pathways. Recently, a Japanese research team devised a database for storing biological information at several different layers of abstraction. KEGG is one of the few databases storing current knowledge of biochemical pathways. In the first section, I give an overview of the KEGG database. The second item at study in this summary is the ideas behind the pathway scoring scheme of Zien et al. (2000). The research article of Zien et al. (2000) presents an approach for scoring putative pathways using gene expression data. Three different kinds of scoring functions were invented. I give a short description of each of them.