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Department of Energy Funds SRI to Enhance Bioinformatics Tools for Renewable Energy Research

January 29, 2011

SRI International, an independent nonprofit research and development organization, announced today it has been awarded a grant by the Department of Energy (DOE) to expand its MetaCyc database and enhance its Pathway Tools software. This project will give SRI’s bioinformatics tools even greater utility in the emerging area of bioenergy, or renewable energy derived from biological sources.
SRI will expand its MetaCyc database to include energy-related metabolic pathways and enzymes associated with lignocellulosic biomass degradation, hydrogen production, and microalgae oil production. This expansion will allow the Pathway Tools software to recognize bioenergy-related pathways in sequenced microbes, resulting in more accurate metabolic pathway reconstructions, and enabling scientists to develop new ways to produce fuel and other valuable products from biomass and microorganisms.
MetaCyc, a database in SRI’s BioCyc database collection, is the largest database of experimentally determined and literature-curated metabolic pathways available. Pathway Tools is a collection of software tools that predicts the metabolic pathways of organisms from their sequenced genomes and generates organism-specific pathway databases by comparing the genome annotation of each organism to the pathways within the MetaCyc database. The software also helps researchers query, visualize, analyze, and curate pathway databases. BioCyc is a collection of such pathway databases.
BioCyc databases are freely available to all researchers. Pathway Tools software is freely available to academics for research purposes.

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