Drawing Kegg Pathways

Question

[Raygozak]

Does anyone know which software does KEGG people use to draw the pathway images?

[Egon Willighagen]

Are you looking for their layout and design specifically, or any tool for drawing pathways? (That is, how do you define a "KEGG pathway"?)

[Raygozak]

I'm looking to know if they're using a VLSI design drawing program to create something that looks good. By KEGG pathway i mean the actual diagram that you can get from the KEGG website.

[Egon Willighagen]

OK, cool. Because if any rendering would have done, I would have answered with PathVisio, which you can use for KEGG pathways too.

Answer 1

[Peter]

I think you'll find a lot of useful background information about the KEGG pathway images (and some possibly relevant Python code depending on what you want to do) in this series of blog posts:

1. http://armchairbiology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/keggwatch-part-i.html
2. http://armchairbiology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/keggwatch-part-ii.html
3. http://armchairbiology.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/keggwatch-part-iii.html

Answer 2

[gaou]

I am not affiliated with the KEGG team, but I have heard from its members that the KEGG team have long been using a legacy version of Canvas software (v.3.5 released in 1992 for Mac) until around 2007, when the KEGG team developed their own in-house drawing software named something like KEGG Draw (never publicly released), which internally holds all vector data in KGML+ format (basically XML format including KGML + SVG).