MetageGMRC: A web server for genome-scale metabolic reconstruction and comparison of metagenomes

More and more environmental microbial communities, also known as metagenomes, are sequenced and analysed in the past few years. Improving the understanding of metagenomic metabolism based on metabolic reconstruction, has wide potential applications and attracts more and more attentions. The current approach for metabolic reconstruction of metagenomes predicts metabolic pathway based on the available dataset and excludes the novel metabolic function in microbial communities. Considering the weakness of available approaches for metagenomic metabolic reconstrucion, a web server called MetageGMRC was developed for metabolic reaction network of microbial communities. MetageGMRC can reconstruct metabolic reaction network based on the integration of available general metabolic databases. It accepts the annotation of metagenome as input data and outputs the metabolic reaction network on which scientists can perform server applications. Novel metabolic pathway may be discovered during analyse of metabolic reaction network. Finally,we download annotations of microbial communities and reconstruct the metabolic reaction network of them respectively, researchers can acquire these data from the server. MetageGMRC is freely accessible at http://bioinfo.ustc.edu.cn/softwares/metageGMRC/.