UPO-Sevilla, UPF-CRG-Barcelona and Valencia_UPV teams met up this year to share their projects. From that point on, and on-going active communication has continued. As a result, UPO-Sevilla and UPF-CGR-Barcelona teams found that they both were working with metabolic pathway modeling. Particularly, assessment of metabolite concentrations in different biochemical routes were necessary.

And so, it was time for the corresponding dry labs to cooperate. It turned out that both softwares were actually very similar, although UPO-Sevilla’s software assumed the first metabolite in the pathway to be a “source” and therefore constant in concentration. This is justified by the need to model primarily assimilation of a constant source of glycerol by Pseudomonas putida.

At the same time, there was a consensus between the groups to specialize in the format of the computer applications. UPF-CGR-Barcelona team opted for a more user-friendly approach (“Polyenzime”), displaying a graphical interface. This way, they facilitate computer analysis of biochemical pathways even for non-computer experts, and this constitutes an excellent contribution in the field. Then, UPO-Sevilla team worked to orient its metabolic pathway modeling software to advanced users. That is, researchers interested in making an intensive use of the program, or developers pursuing implementing the software as a module for their own programs. For this goal, all of the input parameters and output results in the application are set in the form of text files.