Path finding approaches and metabolic pathways

A metabolic pathway is a set of enzyme catalysed biochemical reactions by which a living organism transforms an initial (source) compound into a final (target) compound. Path finding approaches to metabolic pathways adopt a graph theory approach to the problem of determining the reactions an organism might use to transform a source compound into a target compound. In this paper, the effectiveness of using compound node connectivities in a path finding approach is examined. An approach to path finding based upon integer programming is also presented.