SMPDB (The Small Molecule Pathway Database) is an interactive, visual database containing more than 350 small molecule pathways found in humans. More than 2/3 of these pathways (>280) are not found in any other pathway database. SMPDB is designed specifically to support pathway elucidation and pathway discovery in metabolomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and systems biology. It is able to do so, in part, by providing exquisitely detailed, fully searchable, hyperlinked diagrams of human metabolic pathways, metabolic disease pathways, metabolite signaling pathways and drug-action pathways. All SMPDB pathways include information on the relevant organs, subcellular compartments, protein cofactors, protein locations, metabolite locations, chemical structures and protein quaternary structures. Each small molecule is hyperlinked to detailed descriptions contained in the HMDB or DrugBank and each protein or enzyme complex is hyperlinked to UniProt. All SMPDB pathways are accompanied with detailed descriptions and references, providing an overview of the pathway, condition or processes depicted in each diagram. The database is easily browsed and supports full text, sequence and chemical structure searching. Users may query SMPDB with lists of metabolite names, drug names, genes/protein names, SwissProt IDs, GenBank IDs, Affymetrix IDs or Agilent microarray IDs. These queries will produce lists of matching pathways and highlight the matching molecules on each of the pathway diagrams. Gene, metabolite and protein concentration data can also be visualized through SMPDB's mapping interface. All of SMPDB's images, image maps, descriptions and tables are downloadable.
SMPDB is supported by David Wishart, Departments of Computing Science & Biological Sciences, University of Alberta.
- Wishart DS, Frolkis A, Knox C, et al., SMPDB: The Small Molecule Pathway Database. Nucleic Acids Res. 2010 Jan;38(Database issue):D480-7.