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Updated: Jun 13, 2026

A Web Tool for Generating High Quality Machine-readable Biological Pathways
Published on: February 8, 2017
The mEPN scheme: an intuitive and flexible graphical system for rendering biological pathways
Tom C Freeman1, Sobia Raza, Athanasios Theocharidis
1Division of Pathway Medicine, University of Edinburgh Medical School, The Chancellor's Building, College of Medicine, 49 Little France Crescent, Edinburgh, UK. Tom.Freeman@roslin.ed.ac.uk
Background:
There is general agreement amongst biologists about the need for good pathway diagrams and a need to formalize the way biological pathways are depicted. However, implementing and agreeing how best to do this is currently the subject of some debate.
Results:
The modified Edinburgh Pathway Notation (mEPN) scheme is founded on a notation system originally devised a number of years ago and through use has now been refined extensively. This process has been primarily driven by the author's attempts to produce process diagrams for a diverse range of biological pathways, particularly with respect to immune signaling in mammals. Here we provide a specification of the mEPN notation, its symbols, rules for its use and a comparison to the proposed Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) scheme.
Conclusions:
We hope this work will contribute to the on-going community effort to develop a standard for depicting pathways and will provide a coherent guide to those planning to construct pathway diagrams of their biological systems of interest.
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