, 1993), and the protein function databases PROSITE (Bairoch, 1991), Pfam (Sonnhammer et al., 1997), InterPro (Apweiler et al., 2001), GenomeNet Motif (Kanehisa et al., 2002) and ExPASy ENZYME (Bairoch,

2000), and the protein structure databases PDB (Bernstein et al., 1977), SCOP (Murzin et al., 1995), CATH (Orengo et al., 1997), FSSP (Holm and Sander, 1994), and the integrated databases at NCBI (National Center of Biotechnology Information), EBI (European Bioinformatics Institute), SIB (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics), and GenomeNet. Due to the recent successful development of high-throughput measurement techniques, the rate of biological data accumulation has become even faster, vastly exceeding the knowledge capacity of the human mind. The IUBMB׳s Enzyme List (EC numbers) classifies enzymes based on published experimental data and provides extremely useful selleckchem information regarding experimental evidence. The Enzyme List classifies enzymes hierarchically; where up to the sub-subclass (the third number) is a systematic classification of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. The fourth number of the Enzyme List is a serial number given to an experimentally observed (and published) enzyme with details of the reaction including substrate specificity, cofactor, etc. The full EC number record is linked to the PubMed ID, enabling easy access to the original paper. There are currently two types of EC numbers; official EC numbers and unofficial

EC numbers. The first is the representation of biochemical knowledge organized by the IUBMB–IUPAC Biochemical Nomenclature Committee. The second is for genome annotation to identify enzyme genes (and enzymes), which are not organized Dabrafenib by the Biochemical Nomenclature Committee, but by the annotators of databases including KEGG ( Kanehisa et al., 2010), based on sequence similarity. KEGG once used EC numbers as primary identifiers of enzymes, but

not anymore, due to reasons that will ever be discussed later. Enzyme functions are highly dependent on the enzyme׳s protein structures. Like any other proteins, enzymes are also synthesized in the ribosome using the nucleic acid sequences of genes as their templates, therefore their structures are the products of evolution. Evolutionally close enzymes have similar motifs, and form a group of enzymes. In homologous proteins, even if the proteins are not similar as a whole, the regions of common functions or structural restrictions, motifs and specific functions all tend to be preserved well. Some empirical knowledge has been becoming clear through the development of structural biology and site-directed mutagenesis. The site-directed mutagenesis studies have been performed since 1980s to change enzyme functions (Carter, 1986), through a trial and error process. Because a proteins X-ray crystal structure is still difficult to stably obtain, there have been many attempts to predict enzyme structure and function from amino acid sequences.