XeDetect

Bacterial communities are complex biosystems with intertwined trophic links. Degradation of nearly each xenobiotic or toxin is a multi-step process involving many enzymes. Efficient elimination of pollutants is available only in diverse microorganisms’ communities.
XeDetect consider microbial community as a biosystem in which microbial populations are capable to perform a specific set of biochemical reactions. XeDetect uses MetaCyc database to reveal lists of enzyme-catalyzed reactions available for the microorganisms found during 16S rDNA sequencing studies. Next, XeDetect tries to identify metabolic pathways including these reactions. The availability of these pathways is assessed basing on the abundance of microorganisms performing their elementary steps. In contrast to other tools (such as MEGAN), it allows to predict metabolic pathways basing only on the taxonomic data. XeDetect does not require metagenome sequencing results.