A one-stop-shop for genome and metabolic pathway data and powerful bioinformatics tools for exploring it

Developed by SRI International®, originally Stanford Research Institute, and now available via the Ovid platform, BioCyc is a collection of databases with genetic, pathway, and other information together with integrated software tools that can be used to browse, search, analyze, and visualize it. Ideal for teaching, research, and clinical or product development, BioCyc accelerates science in genetic and metabolic engineering, drug discovery, vaccine design, and more.

BioCyc key features

  • Over 20,000 organism-centric databases covering all domains of life; those of many models and highly studied organisms have been curated with data from over 130,000 publications. Each database contains the annotated genome of the organism, its metabolic pathways, plus other information including, for some, regulatory networks.
  • Combines encyclopedic data with powerful informatics tools in one resource
  • New expanded releases occur twice per year.
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Medical professional conducting research in a lab using a laptop and microsope

Databases in the BioCyc collection


Tier 1 databases have received at least one person-year of curation and often many more

They include MetaCyc and databases for Escherichia coli (EcoCyc), human (HumanCyc), Arabidopsis thaliana (AraCyc), and yeast (YeastCyc).

Tier 2 databases have received up to one person-year of curation

They include those for many model and other highly studied organisms such as Bacillus subtilis, Agrobacterium tumefaciens, Salmonella enterica, Lactobacillus plantarum, Helicobacter pylori, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and Vibrio cholerae.

Tier 3 databases are entirely computationally generated

Bioinformatics software tools

  • One-stop-shop of easy-to-use tools
  • Decreases the number of packages that users must learn and that an organization must support
  • Publication-ready visualizations
  • Robust search capabilities
  • Analysis tools
  • Comparison tools
  • SmartTables enabling complex analyses without the need for programming
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