NICEpath: Finding metabolic pathways in large networks through atom-conserving substrate-product pairs

Motivation: Finding biosynthetic pathways is essential for metabolic engineering of organisms to produce chemicals, biodegradation prediction of pollutants and drugs, and for the elucidation of bioproduction pathways of secondary metabolites. A key step in biosynthetic pathway design is the extraction of novel metabolic pathways from big networks that integrate known biological, as well as novel, predicted biotransformations. However, the efficient analysis and the navigation of big biochemical networks remain a challenge.