SynPAL — Synteny Informed Pathway Assembly & Layout
A conservation atlas that treats gene order as a design variable:887 metabolic pathways scored across55 prokaryotic genomes, with assembly-oriented downloads for the design-ready pathways (T1 + T2).
Overview
SynPAL maps metabolic pathway genes onto real genomic coordinates and measures how often they stay clustered — same replicon, same strand, within 2,000 bp — across species. Pathways whose arrangements are conserved are converted into gene-order recommendations and downloadable constructs (method,atlas,designs).
Data provenance
Pathway–enzyme mappings are BioCyc-derived aggregates; genomes are55 curated prokaryotes (one representative per species). All scores are computed withmethod v2 co-directional clustering (gap ≤ 2,000 bp) and exported as a static snapshot from reanalysis/database/synpal.db on2026-07-30. 7,225gene symbols are indexed for lookup.
Software
The analysis pipeline is provided as the synpalPython toolkit (reanalysis/ in the source repository); this website is a fully staticAstro build deployed on Cloudflare Pages — every JSON file under /data/ is directly downloadable. No accounts, no API keys, no server-side compute.
Limitations
- Gene matching is name-based (case-insensitive symbol), not sequence orthology — conserved ordercoverage is understated, and rare name collisions are possible.
- Conservation is descriptive: a conserved arrangement is an evolutionary precedent, not a guarantee of heterologous performance.
- All designs are in silico. Primers are a Wallace heuristic, not Primer3 output. Nothing here has been built or tested in the lab.
Citation & contact
A manuscript describing the resource is in preparation. Until then, cite the dataset snapshot (2026-07-30,method v2 co-directional) and link to this site.
Correspondence: [contact — pending publication]