What are functional pathways and subsystems?
Just as the use of genome clustering and gene proximity can improve the prediction of protein function, so does the application of functional pathways and subsystems. At Integrated Genomics, a pathway is defined as a set of proteins involved in successive or related biochemical, metabolic, structural or functional reactions. Pathways that have related substrates and/or intermediates are grouped together into a functional subsystem (examples of subsystems include amino acid metabolism, protein secretion, DNA replication and repair). Clustering proteins based on their pathways allows investigators to see complete as well as incomplete pathways. Since these pathways comprise functionally linked proteins, a cluster of proteins based on their subsystem markedly improves the accuracy of our functional assignments.
