In bioinformatics EcoCyc is a

biological database Biological databases are libraries of biological sciences, collected from scientific experiments, published literature, high-throughput experiment technology, and computational analysis. They contain information from research areas including geno ...

for the

bacterium Bacteria (; singular: bacterium) are ubiquitous, mostly free-living organisms often consisting of one biological cell. They constitute a large domain of prokaryotic microorganisms. Typically a few micrometres in length, bacteria were amon ...

Escherichia coli ''Escherichia coli'' (),Wells, J. C. (2000) Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow ngland Pearson Education Ltd. also known as ''E. coli'' (), is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus '' Esc ...

'' K-12. The EcoCyc project performs literature-based curation of the ''E. coli'' genome, and of ''E. coli'' transcriptional regulation, transporters, and metabolic pathways. EcoCyc contains written summaries of ''E. coli'' genes, distilled from over 36,000 scientific articles. EcoCyc is also a description of the genome and cellular networks of ''E. coli'' that supports scientists to carry out computational analyses. Data objects in the EcoCyc database describe each ''E. coli''

gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "... Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a b ...

and gene product. Database objects also describe molecular interactions, including

metabolic pathways In biochemistry, a metabolic pathway is a linked series of chemical reactions occurring within a cell. The reactants, products, and intermediates of an enzymatic reaction are known as metabolites, which are modified by a sequence of chemical re ...

, transport events, and the regulation of gene expression. EcoCyc provides several genome-scale visualization tools to aid in the analysis of omics data, such as by painting gene expression or metabolomics data onto the full regulatory network of ''E. coli''. EcoCyc can be accessed through the EcoCyc web site, as a set of downloadable files, and in conjunction with the Pathway Tools software that can be installed locally on Macintosh, PC/Windows, and PC/Linux computers. The downloadable software provides capabilities that go well beyond the web version of EcoCyc.

References

Biological databases Escherichia coli {{Biodatabase-stub