Abstract
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.
Data availability
The PGDBs can be downloaded from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16021633) or via the Pathway Tools Registry. The PGDBs can also be accessed at https://lumbricyc.mpi-magdeburg.mpg.de/. The scripts for creating Pathway Tools input and the metabolic models are available on GitHub (https://github.com/cnapy-org/earthworm-models) together with the models themselves.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Steffen Klamt for suggestions on the manuscript. Figure 1 was created in BioRender, cf. https://BioRender.com/70vnz62.
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A. v. K. carried out the entire study.
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von Kamp, A. LumbriCyc: towards metabolic modelling of earthworms.
npj Syst Biol Appl (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-026-00661-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41540-026-00661-y
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