# Jimmy Ouellet

- **Event:** [Built with Claude: Life Sciences](https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences)
- **When:** Jul 7 at 12:00 PM – Jul 14 at 12:00 AM (EDT)
- **Where:** Online
- **Team:** [Jimmy Ouellet](https://cerebralvalley.ai/u/Jouell3)
- **GitHub:** https://github.com/jouell3/KatalistSeek
- **Demo video:** https://youtu.be/8hObaubnyAg
- **Gallery:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery
- **Page:** https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery/121

KatalistSeek — a grounded reasoning layer over fragmented enzyme/reaction databases.

Curated knowledge databases about a biochemical pathway or enzyme are scattered all over the internet — PubChem, Rhea, UniProt, COCONUT, AlphaFold, ChEBI. The questions a researcher actually cares about are: how do I make this molecule, and which enzyme catalyses the step? and what else might this enzyme accept? Answering either today means hours of manual cross-referencing to ensure grounded structure and honest provenance.
KatalistSeek is a tool that will hopefully fill that gap by providing grounded and a provenance-tagged reasoning layer that collapses that work into minutes. Two modes share one core — make a molecule (target → natural-product gate → grounded producing reactions → candidate enzymes → homologue family → binding-pocket fit) and substrate scope of an enzyme (enzyme → its ortholog family, how the substrate drifts across species, its literature, its 3-D pocket, and a discovery step that proposes candidate promiscuous substrates from structurally-similar natural products — separating those already documented in a reaction from purely structural look-alikes).
What makes the output trustworthy enough to act on is one non-negotiable rule: no EC number, accession, or catalytic residue is ever emitted unless a live database call returned it in the current session. Every biological claim carries a provenance handle back to the exact record that produced it; when retrieval fails, the tool says so and stops — it never backfills from memory. On naringenin it recovers chalcone isomerase from a live call and ranks the fold family so that catalytically inactive fold-homologues fall below the true isomerases — showing that conservation is not activity — while refusing to invent a precursor for a xenobiotic that has none.

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Markdown version of https://cerebralvalley.ai/e/built-with-claude-life-sciences/hackathon/gallery/121. Site index for agents: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms.txt · full text: https://cerebralvalley.ai/llms-full.txt