BRENDA - Content and Features

Content and Features

Database:

The database contains more than 40 data fields with enzyme-specific information on more than 4800 EC numbers that are classified according to the IUBMB. The different data fields cover information on the enzyme's nomenclature, reaction and specificity, enzyme structure, isolation and preparation, enzyme stability, kinetic parameters such as Km value and turnover number, occurrence and localization, mutants and engineered enzymes, application of enzymes and ligand-related data. The data originates from almost 85,000 different scientific articles. Each enzyme entry is clearly linked to at least one literature reference, to its source organism, and, where available, to the protein sequence of the enzyme. Furthermore, cross-references to external information resources such as sequence and 3D-structure databases, as well as biomedical ontologies, are provided.

Extensions:

Since 2006, the data in BRENDA is supplemented with information extracted from the scientific literature by a co-occurrence based text mining approach. For this purpose, two text-mining repositories FRENDA (Full Reference ENzyme DAta) and AMENDA (Automatic Mining of ENzyme DAta) were introduced. These text-mining results were derived from the titles and abstracts of all articles in the literature database PubMed.

Data access:

There are several tools to obtain access to the data in BRENDA. Some of them are listed here.

• Several different query forms (e.g., quick and advanced search)
• EC tree browser
• Taxonomy tree browser
• Ontologies for different biological domains (e.g., BRENDA tissue ontology, Gene Ontology)
• Thesaurus for ligand names
• Chemical substructure search engine for ligand structures
• SOAP interface