Parsing KEGG XML Files to Find Shared and Duplicate Compounds Contained in Metabolic Pathway Maps: A Graph-Theoretical Perspective

The basic graph layout technique, one of many visualization techniques, deals with the problem of positioning vertices in a way to maximize some measure of desirability in a graph. The technique is becoming critically important for further development of the field of systems biology. However, applying the appropriate automatic graph layout techniques to the genomic scale flow of metabolism requires an understanding of the characteristics and patterns of duplicate and shared vertices, which is crucial for bioinformatics software developers. In this paper, we provide the results of parsing KEGG XML files from a graph-theoretical perspective, for future research in the area of automatic layout techniques in biological pathway domains.

J2dpathway: A Global Metabolic Pathway Viewer with Node-Abstracting Features

The static approach of representing metabolic pathway diagrams offers no flexibility. Thus, many systems adopt automatic graph layout techniques to visualize the topological architecture of pathways. There are weaknesses, however, because automatically drawn figures are generally difficult to understand. The problem becomes even more serious when we attempt to visualize all of the information in a single, big picture, which usually results in a confusing diagram. To provide a partial solution to this thorny issue, we propose J2dpathway, a metabolic pathway atlas viewer that has node-abstracting features.

A Metabolic Pathway Drawing Algorithm for Reducing the Number of Edge Crossings

For the direct understanding of flow, pathway data are usually represented as directed graphs in biological journals and texts. Databases of metabolic pathways or signal transduction pathways inevitably contain these kinds of graphs to show the flow. KEGG, one of the representative pathway databases, uses the manually drawn figure which can not be easily maintained. Graph layout algorithms are applied for visualizing metabolic pathways in some databases, such as EcoCyc. Although these can express any changes of data in the real time, it exponentially increases the edge crossings according to the increase of nodes. For the understanding of genome scale flow of metabolism, it is very important to reduce the unnecessary edge crossings which exist in the automatic graph layout. We propose a metabolic pathway drawing algorithm for reducing the number of edge crossings by considering the fact that metabolic pathway graph is scale-free network. The experimental results show that the number of edge crossings is reduced about 37~40% by the consideration of scale-free network in contrast with non-considering scale-free network. And also we found that the increase of nodes do not always mean that there is an increase of edge crossings.