Metabolic pathway database for human gut microbiome

Abstract

Various microbial species construct functional eco-system in our intestine. The field of human gut microbiome study is rapidly expanding due to metagenomics based on the development of next generation sequencers. Metagenomics provides huge amount of sequence data, therefore, functional reference database, such as KEGG or COG, is essential to interpret the functionality of the derived sequences.

Database is one of the most important factor in the modern life science. The high accuracy and coverage of the contents in the database improves and facilitates the biological big data analysis.

In this review, I introduce the basic of life sciecnce database for functional annotation. In addition, our own metabolic pathway database is also illustrated here. We are developing the database to understand

metabolic functionality for human gut microbiome. This database contains basic metabolic pathways and modules for microbiome living in human large intestine. This database complements current reference database, such as KEGG or COG.