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WILDkCAT: extract, retrieve, and predict enzyme turnover numbers of constraint-based metabolic models

Jul 2026 · Bioinform. · Vol 42 · 1 citation · 23 references
Medicine Computer Science

TL;DR

The ability of WILDkCAT to retrieve substantial kcat coverage and its applicability across diverse genome-scale models demonstrated the ability of WILDkCAT to retrieve substantial kcat coverage and its applicability across diverse genome-scale models.

Abstract

Abstract Summary Accurate enzyme turnover numbers are essential for building enzyme-constrained genome-scale metabolic models. However, collecting and curating these parameters remains a major bottleneck. Indeed, kcat values are scattered across multiple databases, reported under varying experimental conditions, and often missing for many enzymes. To address this challenge, we present WILDkCAT, a Python-based pipeline that enables the retrieval of kcat values from wild-type enzyme measured under user-specified pH and temperature ranges for a given metabolic model. The application to Escherichia coli (iML1515) and Homo sapiens (Human-GEM) models demonstrated the ability of WILDkCAT to retrieve substantial kcat coverage and its applicability across diverse genome-scale models. Availability and implementation WILDkCAT is available at https://github.com/sysbiolux/WILDkCAT and from PyPI. WILDkCAT works on all major operating systems and computer architectures. The documentation is available at https://sysbiolux.github.io/WILDkCAT.

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