PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Melissa D. Walker AU - Gabrielle E. Giese AU - Amy D. Holdorf AU - Sushila Bhattacharya AU - Cédric Diot AU - Aurian P. García-González AU - Brent Horowitz AU - Yong-Uk Lee AU - Thomas Leland AU - Xuhang Li AU - Zeynep Mirza AU - Huimin Na AU - Shivani Nanda AU - Olga Ponomarova AU - Hefei Zhang AU - Jingyan Zhang AU - L. Safak Yilmaz AU - Albertha J.M. Walhout TI - WormPaths: <em>Caenorhabditis elegans</em> metabolic pathway annotation and visualization AID - 10.1101/2020.12.22.424026 DP - 2020 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 2020.12.22.424026 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/23/2020.12.22.424026.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/12/23/2020.12.22.424026.full AB - In our group, we aim to understand metabolism in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and its relationships with gene expression, physiology and the response to therapeutic drugs. On March 15, 2020, a stay-at-home order was put into effect in the state of Massachusetts, USA, to flatten the curve of the spread of the novel SARS-CoV2 virus that causes COVID-19. For biomedical researchers in our state, this meant putting a hold on experiments for nine weeks until May 18, 2020. To keep the lab engaged and productive, and to enhance communication and collaboration, we embarked on an in-lab project that we all found important but that we never had the time for: the detailed annotation and drawing of C. elegans metabolic pathways. As a result, we present WormPaths, which is composed of two parts: 1) the careful manual annotation of metabolic genes into pathways, categories and levels, and 2) 66 pathway maps that include metabolites, metabolite structures, genes, reactions, and pathway connections between maps. These maps are available on our WormFlux website. We show that WormPaths provides easy-to-navigate maps and that the different levels in WormPaths can be used for metabolic pathway enrichment analysis of transcriptomic data. In the unfortunate event of additional lockdowns, we envision further developing these maps to be more interactive, with an analogy of road maps that are available on mobile devices.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.