BioSynther: a customized biosynthetic potential explorer.

Abstract

One of the most promising applications of biosynthetic methods is to produce chemical products of high value from the ready-made chemicals. To explore the biosynthetic potentials of a chemical as a synthesis precursor, biosynthetic databases and related chemoinformatics tools are urgently needed. In the present work, a web-based tool, BioSynther, is developed to explore the biosynthetic potentials of precursor chemicals using BKM-react, Rhea, and more than 50,000 in-house RxnFinder reactions manually curated. BioSynther allows researchers to explore biosynthetic potentials, through so far known biochemical reactions, step by step interactively, which could be used as a useful tool in metabolic engineering and synthetic biology. BioSynther is available at: http://www.lifemodules.org/BioSynther/. hu_qn@tib.cas.cn. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.