High quality visualization of biochemical pathways in BioPath

Falk Schreiber

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleResearchpeer-review

47 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Biochemical reactions form large and complex networks. Comprehensible visual representations of these networks help biochemists understand the relationships between the chemical components. Typically pathway diagrams are manually produced drawings. Because of the steady progress of knowledge and the complex relationships in these networks, automatic visualizations are necessary. BioPath is a system for the exploration and automatic visualization of biochemical pathways. It has been developed to obtain an electronic version of the well-known Boehringer Biochemical Pathways poster and offers new possibilities to find information and to navigate through pathways. BioPath has a specific database containing reactions and a hierarchical clustering of reactions and reaction networks. One feature is the automatic generation of pathways from the database and their high quality visualization. This paper states the requirements for the visualization of biochemical pathways, presents a layout algorithm and shows how BioPath can be used to explore biochemical reaction networks.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)59-73
Number of pages15
JournalIn Silico Biology
Volume2
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2002
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Biochemical pathways
  • Graph drawing
  • Metabolic pathways
  • Visualization

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