Precursorfinder

PrecursorFinder is a computational platform for discovering biosynthetic precursors of high-value compounds. It leverages chemical structure analysis, similarity matching, and maximum common substructure (MCS) algorithms to identify optimal starting molecules for novel metabolic pathway design, accelerating the biosynthesis of pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals.

The platform integrates a manually curated database of >60,000 biosynthesized compounds and 280,000 biochemical reactions extracted from 500,000+ scientific publications. As the first tool to combine structure-based, similarity-based, and MCS-based precursor exploration, it provides biologists with experimentally validated candidates (e.g., predicting 5 verified precursors for melatonin).

Researchers interactively visualize compound-centric reaction networks, rank precursors by structural relevance, and export data for experimental validation. PrecursorFinder bridges synthetic biology and metabolic engineering by transforming unknown pathways into actionable designs.