PASS-based prediction of metabolites detection in biological systems

Metabolite identification is an essential part of the drug discovery and development process. Experimental methods allow identifying metabolites and estimating their relative amount, but they require cost-intensive and time-consuming techniques. Computational methods for metabolite prediction are devoid of these shortcomings and may be applied at the early stage of drug discovery. In this study, we investigated the possibility of creating SAR models for the prediction of the qualitative metabolite yield (‘major’, ‘minor’, ”trace” and ”negligible”) depending on species and biological experimental systems. In addition, we have created models for prediction of xenobiotic excretion depending on its administration route for different species. The prediction is based on an algorithm of naïve Bayes classifier implemented in PASS software. The average accuracy of prediction was 0.91 for qualitative metabolite yield prediction and 0.89 for prediction of xenobiotic excretion. The created models were included as a component of MetaTox web application, which allows predicting the xenobiotic metabolism pathways (http://www.way2drug.com/mg).