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MOTIVATION: As the blueprints of cellular actions, biological pathways characterize the roles of genomic entities in various cellular mechanisms, and as such, their availability, manipulation and queriability over the web is important to facilitate ongoing biological research. RESULTS: In this article, we present the new features of PathCase, a system to store, query, visualize and analyze metabolic pathways at different levels of genetic, molecular, biochemical and organismal detail. The new features include: (i) a web-based system with a new architecture, containing a server-side and a client-side, and promoting scalability, and flexible and easy adaptation of different pathway databases, (ii) an interactive client-side visualization tool for metabolic pathways, with powerful visualization capabilities, and with integrated gene and organism viewers, (iii) two distinct querying capabilities: an advanced querying interface for computer savvy users, and built-in queries for ease of use, that can be issued directly from pathway visualizations and (iv) a pathway functionality analysis tool. PathCase is now available for three different datasets, namely, KEGG pathways data, sample pathways from the literature and BioCyc pathways for humans. AVAILABILITY: Available online at http://nashua.case.edu/pathways

We consider pedigree data structured in the form of a directed acyclic graph, and use an encoding scheme, called NodeCodes, for expediting the evaluation of queries on pedigree graph structures. Inbreeding is the quantitative measure of the genetic relationship between two individuals. The inbreeding coefficient is related to the probability that both copies of any given gene are received from the same ancestor. In this paper we discuss the evaluation of the inbreeding coefficient of a given individual using NodeCodes. We implemented and tested our approach with both synthetic and real pedigree data. Experimental results show that the use of NodeCodes provides a good alternative for queries involving the inbreeding coefficient, with significant improvements over the traditional iterative evaluation methods.