LumbriCyc: towards metabolic modelling of earthworms

Until Charles Darwin published his book on earthworms in 1881, their role in the soil was largely unclear. By now, the importance of earthworms for soil fertility has been recognized and their phenomenology is being studied for various purposes. The investigation of earthworm molecular biology is, however, comparatively underdeveloped. This study describes the creation of BioCyc pathway genome databases for the two earthworms Lumbricus rubellus and Lumbricus terrestris, together with the first genome-scale metabolic models of these species.