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Updated: May 27, 2026

A Web Tool for Generating High Quality Machine-readable Biological Pathways
Published on: February 8, 2017
Rhea--a manually curated resource of biochemical reactions
Rafael Alcántara1, Kristian B Axelsen, Anne Morgat
1Chemoinformatics and Metabolism Team, European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD, UK. rafael.alcantara@ebi.ac.uk
Abstract:
Rhea (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/rhea) is a comprehensive resource of expert-curated biochemical reactions. Rhea provides a non-redundant set of chemical transformations for use in a broad spectrum of applications, including metabolic network reconstruction and pathway inference. Rhea includes enzyme-catalyzed reactions (covering the IUBMB Enzyme Nomenclature list), transport reactions and spontaneously occurring reactions. Rhea reactions are described using chemical species from the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology (ChEBI) and are stoichiometrically balanced for mass and charge. They are extensively manually curated with links to source literature and other public resources on metabolism including enzyme and pathway databases. This cross-referencing facilitates the mapping and reconciliation of common reactions and compounds between distinct resources, which is a common first step in the reconstruction of genome scale metabolic networks and models.
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