A web tool for executing low cost algorithms for metabolic pathway comparison based on graph similarity

Metabolic pathways contain a huge amount of information ready to be exploited. Metabolic Pathway comparison can help to evaluate evolutionary aspects, industrially important routes, or novel medicines. Pathway or graph comparison has been described to be NP. Here we present a web tool that runs low-cost algorithms proposed for pathway comparison between graphs representing metabolic pathways. The first algorithm converts the graph into a 1D structure and then generates alignment scores; while the second one details the similarities and differences between the input pathways. The tool proved to be a good source of criteria for the evaluation of metabolic pathways comparison. The simplification of the methods does not affect the significance of the similarity obtained. The tool can be accessed through the URL: ebro.ec.tec.ac.cr.