The EBI enzyme portal

Abstract

The availability of comprehensive information about enzymes plays an important role in answering questions relevant to interdisciplinary fields such as biochemistry, enzymology, biofuels, bioengineering and drug discovery. At the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute, we have developed an enzyme portal (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/enzymeportal) to provide this wealth of information on enzymes from multiple in-house resources addressing particular data classes: protein sequence and structure, reactions, pathways and small molecules. The fact that these data reside in separate databases makes information discovery cumbersome. The main goal of the portal is to simplify this process for end users.

Figure 1.

Search results are grouped as orthologues. Note the paging (top right of the table) and the filter facets (left).

Figure 2.

Search results for ‘CFTR’ filtered to show only enzymes known in Ma’s night monkey.

Figure 3.

Enzyme summary. Orthologues can be selected using the ‘organisms’ drop-down menu at the top. Notice the breadcrumbs at the top left, which include links to the search results and any other orthologues visited previously.

Figure 4.

3D structure tab showing basic information about experimental models of the protein structure.

Figure 5.

Reactions and pathways tab: chemical structures are hyperlinks to the corresponding entities in ChEBI. Additional information about the reaction available from Rhea, Reactome and MACiE is also linked from here. This tab also includes a list of pathways in with every reaction can be involved, including descriptions and graphics when available.

Figure 6.

Small molecules that have been associated in some way to the enzyme, including drugs, inhibitors and activators.