A Description of Meteor

Like Derek for Windows, the Meteor xenobiotic metabolism system has also recently been reviewed. It shares many commonalities with Derek for Windows (and indeed was developed from a common computer-code base) in terms of, for example, the processing of query structures with different constraints, the viewing of results and the generation of reports using different filters. The Meteor knowledge base is composed of a biotransformation dictionary, rules and example metabolic reactions. The biotransformation dictionary consists of 

Biotransformations are supported by comments, which contain information on the scope of the biotransformation and the SMR as well as an outline of the applicability of the biotransformation (usually a summary of the range of chemical space in which the biotransformation has been observed). Comments will also contain information on the mechanism of the chemical transformation (which can involve a number of distinct steps and include reaction intermediates) the enzymes involved in the process (and isozymes where this has been established) some commentary on whether the metabolites associated with the biotransformation are expected to be major, minor or detectable only at trace levels the general quality of structural characterisation of such metabolites and any species selectivity that is known. Biotransformations will usually contain citations of books, reviews and primary literature sources and may additionally have supporting example reactions linked to them. 

The rules in the knowledge base are used by the program s reasoning engine to discriminate between all possible metabolic outcomes and the most likely 

The situation with absolute reasoning rules is more complex since the likelihood of biotransformations can be reasoned depending on factual and heuristic elements such as rates of occurrence in the literature and any known inter-species variations, as well as numerical factors such as substrate lipophilicity and molecular weight. These can be calculated internally or obtained through adaptors to external packages in the same way as for Derek for Windows. 

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