BioPath ⋆ Franz J. Brandenburg, Michael Forster, Andreas Pick, Marcus Raitner, and Falk Schreiber Universit¨atPassau,Innstraße33,94032Passau {brandenb,forster,pick,raitner,schreiber}@fmi.uni-passau.de 1 Short Description Fig. 1. Example Biochemical processes in organisms are con- sidered as very large networks consisting of reactants, products and enzymes with inter- connections representing reactions and regu- lation. Examples are given by the well known Boehringer poster [4] and the Biochemical Pathways atlas [5]. These networks are very complex and grow fast by the steady progress of knowledge in life sciences. BioPath is the result of the Electronic Biochemical Pathways Project [1,3], a joint work of research groups at the universities of Erlangen, Mannheim, Passau and Spek- trum Verlag, Heidelberg. BioPath provides a convenient electronic access to biochemi- cal reactions at a high level of detail and ex- plores all advantages of an electronic version over a printed one. It uses an innovative algo- rithm for drawing directed graphs [7] based on Graphlet [2]. 2 Layout Algorithm and Layout Features The state of the art in the visualization of biochemical reaction networks are manually produced drawings, as they appear in text- books, on the poster [4] or in electronic infor- mation systems. BioPath is the first tool with a dynamic visualization of pathways, which meet the following requirements: ⋆ Supported in part by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) P. Mutzel, M. J¨ unger, and S. Leipert (Eds.): GD 2001, LNCS 2265, pp. 455–456, 2002. c  Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2002