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Updated: May 12, 2026

Enrichment of Mammalian Tissues and Xenopus Oocytes with Cholesterol
Published on: March 25, 2020
A comprehensive machine-readable view of the mammalian cholesterol biosynthesis pathway
Alexander Mazein1, Steven Watterson, Wei-Yuan Hsieh
1Division of Pathway Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Chancellor's Building, Little France Crescent, Edinburgh EH16 4SB, Scotland, UK. a.mazein@oist.jp
None:
Cholesterol biosynthesis serves as a central metabolic hub for numerous biological processes in health and disease. A detailed, integrative single-view description of how the cholesterol pathway is structured and how it interacts with other pathway systems is lacking in the existing literature. Here we provide a systematic review of the existing literature and present a detailed pathway diagram that describes the cholesterol biosynthesis pathway (the mevalonate, the Kandutch-Russell and the Bloch pathway) and shunt pathway that leads to 24(S),25-epoxycholesterol synthesis. The diagram has been produced using the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN) and is available in the SBGN-ML format, a human readable and machine semantically parsable open community file format.
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