A framework of automated reconstruction of microbial metabolic pathways

Describes a framework for the automated reconstruction of metabolic pathways using information about orthologous and homologous gene groups derived by the automated comparison of whole genomes archived in GenBank. The method integrates automatically derived orthologs, orthologous and homologous gene groups (<http:www.mcs.kent.edu/~arvind/orthos.html>), the biochemical pathway template available in the Kegg database (<http://www.genome.ad.jp/>), and enzyme information derived from the SwissProt enzyme database (<http://expasy.hcuge.ch/>) and the Ligand database (<http://www.genome.ad.jp/>). The technique is useful to identify refined metabolic pathways based on operons, and to derive the non-enzymatic genes within a group of enzymes. The technique has been illustrated by a comparison between the E. coli and B. subtilis genomes