ORENZA

About ORENZA
Orphan enzyme activities correpond to the enzyme activities (EC numbers) defined by the Nomenclature Committee of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (NC-IUBMB), and which are not associated with any amino acid sequences in the major public databases (i.e. UniProt, Enzyme, PDB, IntEnz, KEGG, BRENDA).

ORENZA is a relationnal database of ORphan ENZyme Activities and this web site allows you to easily browse and search ORENZA.

This is ORENZA version 1.16 based on UniProt Knowledgebase release 11.2 (Swiss-Prot 53.2+TrEMBL 36.2) of 26-Jun-2007.

Browsing ORENZA
You can browse ORENZA by using two menus: ORrphan ENZyme Activities' or 'EC used by the NC-IUBMB'.
In both cases you can sort the results by EC-number, by classes of activity (according to the NC-IUBMB nomenclature), by KEGG metabolism pathway, by year of creation or by the number of organisms for which such an enzyme activities was reported in BRENDA (uniquely for ORphan ENZyme Activities).
You can also sort the orphan enzyme activities by the number of organisms for which such an enzyme activities was reported in BRENDA.

Searching ORENZA
If you are interested in a peculiar EC number, enzyme activity name or species, you can directly access the associated data by using the 'Search by' menu.

Building an ORENZA community to foster a maximum of orphans
We invite all the ORENZA's users to apply their expertise on enzyme activities in order to 'report sequence evidence', if any, for their favourite enzymes.
It is further possible to approve or disapprove any comment made by a previous research fellow.
Any data and comments will be published on the web page specific to each EC number. We hope that this will help to reduce the number of orphan enzyme activities.

Citation
ORENZA: a web resource for studying ORphan ENZyme Activities.
Lespinet O and Labedan B
BMC Bioinformatics. 2006 Oct 6;7:436.

Publications related to ORENZA
Orphan enzymes could be an unexplored reservoir of new drug targets.
Lespinet O and Labedan B
Drug Discov Today. 2006 Apr;11(7-8):300-5.

Puzzling over orphan enzymes.
Lespinet O and Labedan B
Cell Mol Life Sci. 2006 Mar;63(5):517-23.

Orphan enzymes?
Lespinet O and Labedan B
Science. 2005 Jan 7;307(5706):42.

Contacts
ORENZA was developped and is currently maintained by Olivier Lespinet and Bernard Labedan.
Any comments or suggestions can be directly adressed to any of them.