There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) is a knowledge base for systematic
analysis of gene functions, linking genomic information with higher order functional
information. The genomic information is stored in the GENES database, which is a collection
of gene catalogs for all the completely sequenced genomes and some partial genomes
with up-to-date annotation of gene functions. The higher order functional information
is stored in the PATHWAY database, which contains graphical representations of cellular
processes, such as metabolism, membrane transport, signal transduction and cell cycle.
The PATHWAY database is supplemented by a set of ortholog group tables for the information
about conserved subpathways (pathway motifs), which are often encoded by positionally
coupled genes on the chromosome and which are especially useful in predicting gene
functions. A third database in KEGG is LIGAND for the information about chemical compounds,
enzyme molecules and enzymatic reactions. KEGG provides Java graphics tools for browsing
genome maps, comparing two genome maps and manipulating expression maps, as well as
computational tools for sequence comparison, graph comparison and path computation.
The KEGG databases are daily updated and made freely available (http://www. genome.ad.jp/kegg/).