About
Background
Tailoring enzymes play an essential role in the maturation of secondary metabolites, also known as specialized metabolites. While the core biosynthetic enzymes of a biosynthetic gene cluster are responsible for scaffold formation (the immature compound), tailoring enzymes modify the structure and often enhance biological properties. However, tailoring enzymes strongly vary in their substrate specificities and reaction mechanisms, and even closely related enzymes can act on vastly different substrates.
Why MITE?
Knowledge about reaction and substrate specificities of tailoring enzymes is essential for understanding biosynthesis, but this information is often scattered as narrative articles in the literature. This does not only require researchers to perform time-consuming literature review, but also hampers its use in machine learning-applications.
To close this gap, we created the Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme (MITE) database, an expert-curated resource dedicated to secondary metabolite-acting tailoring enzymes. This database allows to capture the reaction and substrate specificities of tailoring enzymes in a permissive and machine-readable fashion. All entries in the MITE database are expert-reviewed, and freely available as part of the public domain (CC0).
What data is stored in MITE?
MITE exclusively collects experimentally verified (meta)data on tailoring enzymes.
Each MITE entry describes a single, non-redundant enzyme-encoding gene and one or more associated tailoring reactions. These reactions are described as reaction SMARTS, which describe the substrate specificity-reaction relationship of the enzyme. These reaction SMARTS are exemplified by one or more substrate(s) -> product(s) pairs in SMILES format.
Taken together, the tailoring reaction is summarized in a both human- and machine-readable fashion.
How to contribute?
To expand its coverage, MITE relies on data contributions by its users. Users can create new entries using the MITE Submission Portal, or modify existing entries in the MITE database. These submissions are then reviewed by topic matter experts (reviewers) and the database is updated regularly. All data on MITE is available from Zenodo for free, forever.
Interested? Take a look at the data submission tutorial or get in touch. For more information, free to take a look at our publication.