Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Since its creation in 2006, Norine remains the unique knowledgebase dedicated to non-ribosomal peptides (NRPs). These secondary metabolites, produced by bacteria and fungi, harbor diverse interesting biological activities (such as antibiotic, antitumor, siderophore or surfactant) directly related to the diversity of their structures. The Norine team goal is to collect the NRPs and provide tools to analyze them efficiently. We have developed a user-friendly interface and dedicated tools to provide a complete bioinformatics platform. The knowledgebase gathers abundant and valuable annotations on more than 1100 NRPs. To increase the quantity of described NRPs and improve the quality of associated annotations, we are now opening Norine to crowdsourcing. We believe that contributors from the scientific community are the best experts to annotate the NRPs they work on. We have developed MyNorine to facilitate the submission of new NRPs or modifications of stored ones. This article presents MyNorine and other novelties of Norine interface released since the first publication. Norine is freely accessible from the following URL: http://bioinfo.lifl.fr/NRP. © The Author(s) 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Norine is the first database entirely dedicated to nonribosomal peptides (NRPs). In bacteria and fungi, in addition to the traditional ribosomal proteic biosynthesis, an alternative ribosome-independent pathway called NRP synthesis allows peptide production. It is performed by huge protein complexes called nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs). The molecules synthesized by NRPS contain a high proportion of nonproteogenic amino acids. The primary structure of these peptides is not always linear but often more complex and may contain cycles and branchings. In recent years, NRPs attracted a lot of attention because of their biological activities and pharmacological properties (antibiotic, immunosuppressor, antitumor, etc.). However, few computational resources and tools dedicated to those peptides have been available so far. Norine is focused on NRPs and contains more than 700 entries. The database is freely accessible at http://bioinfo.lifl.fr/norine/. It provides a complete computational tool for systematic study of NRPs in numerous species, and as such, should permit to obtain a better knowledge of these metabolic products and underlying biological mechanisms, and ultimately to contribute to the redesigning of natural products in order to obtain new bioactive compounds for drug discovery.