Reaction-Expansion and Gene-Curation in AraCyc for Utilization within Genome-Scale Metabolic Models

The Plant Metabolic Network family of BioCyc databases provide the opportunity to leverage a well-curated set of gene-reaction associations with which to build a genome-scale metabolic model for use with metabolic flux analysis.  The family of flux balance analysis models we build at SEED integrate thermodynamics, and I explain how we utilize the BioCyc compound hierarchy to expand pathway reactions in order to find balanced reactions we can include in the models.  Furthermore, I briefly present PlantSEED, outlining the effort gone into curating gene-reaction associations, much of which was came from AraCyc, and some of which has since been contributed to AraCyc.