Section: New Results

Representation and curation of metabolic data: UniPathway , Rhea and MNX

These activities are carried out in collaboration with the SwissProt group at the Swiss Institute for BioInformatics (SIB). UniPathway (http://www.unipathway.org ) is a manually curated database of metabolic pathways. It provides the official controlled vocabulary for pathway annotation within UniProtKB records since 2009. A complete description of the UniPathway database and of its relationship with UniProtKB has been published in Nucleic Acids Research (Jan. 2012 Database Issue) [22] . Rhea (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/rhea ) is developed jointly with the European Institute for Bioinformatics (EBI) and the SIB. It provides a comprehensive resource of expert-curated biochemical reactions, for use in a large spectrum of applications, including metabolic network reconstruction and pathway inference. The complete description of the Rhea database appeared in the Jan. 2012 NAR Database issue [5] . The MNX project is developed in the context of the MetaNetX project (http://www.metanetx.org ). It attempts to automate the reconciliation of discrepancies between metabolite or reaction information from distinct resources (BiGG , BRENDA , ChEBI/Rhea , KEGG , MetaCyc , UniPathway , The SEED , Reactome ), thereby alleviating a major bottleneck in the construction of genome-scale metabolic network models. The MNXref namespace is available at http://www.metanetx.org/mnxdoc/mnxref.html and the method to compute the MNXref namespace is described in [8] .