What does the META program do?
META (or META-PC) is used to predict the products formed during metabolic breakdown of organic chemicals. The user of META enters a chemical structure, and the program automatically generates a branching tree of metabolites. The first branches on the tree are primary metabolites formed from the parent chemical. Each primary metabolite can give rise to secondary metabolites, each secondary metabolite can form tertiary metabolites, and so on. This information is useful because many chemicals are not biologically active, but can form biologically active metabolites.
