A method of biological pathway similarity search using high performance computing

Comparative study of biological pathway structures and composition can aid us in elucidating the functions of newly discovered pathways, understanding evolutionary traits, and determining missing pathway elements. A method has been developed to perform pair-wise comparison and similarity search of biological pathways. The comparison determines the differences of each pair of pathways represented in the XML format. The similarity search uses a scoring mechanism to rank the similarities of the pathway in question against those in the pathway repository. To achieve a reasonably good performance, the method is being implemented using the Condor high performance computing environment.