A method for customized cross-species metabolic pathway comparison

In the post-human genomic era, more and more other genomes have been sequenced. Comparative genomic analysis gives us an opportunity to find out the similarities and differences among different organisms. Moreover, comparative analysis of metabolic pathway can give us important information on their evolution and potential pharmacological targets. In this study, we propose a cross-species pathway comparison method on customized starting and ending points of pathways. We use both the reconstructed pathway information of different microorganisms from KEGG [2] and the Pathcomp [5], which can generate possible pathways between two compounds, to generate all possible paths in specific organism for decomposition of pathway. With this method, we can find out organism-specific alternative pathway and the similarity between the species compared.