Enzyme data and metabolic information: BRENDA, a resource for research in biology, biochemistry, and medicine

The number of fully sequenced genomes available is rapidly increasing, and experiments are underway to get quantitative information of the transcription and expression of the different gene products. As this is progressing and projects on structural genomics are starting, the lack of readily accessible functional information about proteins is becoming more obvious. Here, we describe the comprehensive enzymatic and metabolic information system BRENDA (BRaunschweig ENzyme DAta base) which has been created - and is continuously updated - by manual extraction and evaluation of functional and molecular parameters on enzymes from the primary literature, presently containing parameters from approx. 35 000 literature references, holding data of at least 20 000 different enzymes from more than 4330 different organisms classified in the approx. 3 700 EC-numbers. More than 260 000 different enzyme/ligand relationships are given in the data repository. BRENDA is available via the world wide web (www.brenda.uni-koeln.de).