BioCyc Database Collection

Subscriptions are now required to access BioCyc. For more information on obtaining a subscription, click here. Why the transition to subscriptions? You do not need to purchase a subscription if your institution's name is displayed on the top right corner of this page or appears here.

BioCyc is a collection of 9389 Pathway/Genome Databases (PGDBs), plus software tools for understanding their data.

Getting Started

New to BioCyc? Typical usage is:

• Select one or more databases (genomes) to search. To do so, click "change organism database" in the box in the top right of every page. By default, BioCyc searches Escherichia coli K-12 substr. MG1655.
• Search for a gene or pathway using the Quick Search, or see the Search menu for more options.

Tools

BioCyc provides tools for navigating, visualizing, and analyzing the underlying databases, and for analyzing omics data:

• Genome browser
• Display of individual metabolic pathways, and of full metabolic maps
• Multiple analysis methods for user-supplied omics and multi-omics datasets including painting onto metabolic maps, regulatory maps, and genome maps
• Store groups of genes and pathways in your account as SmartTables; share, analyze, transform those groups
• Comparative analysis tools

BioCyc Databases

The BioCyc databases are divided into three tiers, based on their quality.

Tier 1 databases have received at least one person-year of literature-based curation, and are the most accurate. EcoCyc and MetaCyc have each received more than 20 person-years of curation.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 databases contain computationally predicted metabolic pathways, predictions as to which genes code for missing enzymes in metabolic pathways, and predicted operons.

Funding Sources

The development of BioCyc is funded by NIH grant GM080746 from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences.