Monday, July 25, 2011
Grand Ballroom, 5th fl (Sheraton New Orleans)
The model eukaryotic organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae plays an important role in a wide variety of industrial and biomedical applications as well as in the advancement of pure science. In order to better leverage the corpus of scientific knowledge about S. cerevisiae, curators at the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) created the Yeast Biochemical Pathways Database (YeastCyc; http://pathway.yeastgenome.org/biocyc/), a collection of manually curated metabolic pathways and enzymes of S. cerevisiae. YeastCyc was initially built using the Pathway Tools software developed by Peter Karp and his colleagues at SRI International. Since then, each pathway has been manually reviewed and curated from the scientific literature. The metabolic pathways, enzymes and reactions of S. cerevisiae can be readily queried and visualized. Pathways can be viewed individually or all together as a cellular overview. High-throughput experimental data from microarray expression studies, proteomics and metabolomics can be overlaid on the cellular overview, enabling researchers to view the results in a global metabolic context and thereby help them interpret their data. Hyperlinks between YeastCyc and SGD integrate the two resources, providing YeastCyc users additional data analysis tools and expanded information about the function of genes and their products.
Pathway information extracted from and visualized within YeastCyc can assist in the optimization of industrial processes involving S. cerevisiae, such as fermentation and biofuel synthesis.
Data from YeastCyc are available for download from SGD and from SRI’s Registry of Pathway/Genome Databases (http://biocyc.org/registry.html). SGD is funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute at the US National Institutes of Health.