Team:Illinois-Tools

This is the first software tools team from the University of Illinois. We are comprised of students majoring in Biology, Bioengineering, and Chemical Engineering. With limited programming and synthetic biology experience, we have been learning a lot along the way.

Our tool, IMPtools, utilizes the reactions stored in the Kegg (Kyoto Encyclopedia for Genes and Genomes) database to create a metabolic pathway that is in some sense optimized for the production of a desired by-product while consuming some desired input. Once inputing your desired input and output products, our program searches for the most optimal metabolic path. Our program has the ability to provide different pathways according to user defined weights, for example, ATP or host organism. The end product we give you is a collection of metabolic pathways and their associated gene sequences. Along with the sequence, we also give you useful infromation necessary, such as a graphical representation and stoichmetric matrix, to carry out experiments in order to validate our results. Our long-term goals include being able to determine what intermediate BioBricks would be necessary to activate the required enzymes for production. In future years, this tool may be useful for our wetlab team to predict some of their metabolic engineering ventures.

Go to IMPtools[http://abe-bhaleraolab.age.uiuc.edu/igem/]