The Carbohydrate-Active EnZymes database (CAZy): an expert resource for Glycogenomics

Abstract

The Carbohydrate-Active Enzyme (CAZy) database is a knowledge-based resource specialized in the enzymes that build and breakdown complex carbohydrates and glycoconjugates. As of September 2008, the database describes the present knowledge on 113 glycoside hydrolase, 91 glycosyltransferase, 19 polysaccharide lyase, 15 carbohydrate esterase and 52 carbohydrate-binding module families. These families are created based on experimentally characterized proteins and are populated by sequences from public databases with significant similarity. Protein biochemical information is continuously curated based on the available literature and structural information. Over 6400 proteins have assigned EC numbers and 700 proteins have a PDB structure. The classification (i) reflects the structural features of these enzymes better than their sole substrate specificity, (ii) helps to reveal the evolutionary relationships between these enzymes and (iii) provides a convenient framework to understand mechanistic properties. This resource has been available for over 10 years to the scientific community, contributing to information dissemination and providing a transversal nomenclature to glycobiologists. More recently, this resource has been used to improve the quality of functional predictions of a number genome projects by providing expert annotation. The CAZy resource resides at URL: http://www.cazy.org/.

Introgression and gene family contraction drive the evolution of lifestyle and host shifts of hypocrealean fungi

“…The abundance and types of these enzymes should be key to the adaption to different host-based nutrition. The expansion and contraction of CAZymes and MEROPS, as key enzymes responsible for substrate utilisation, were detected by the programme CAFÉ (Figure 4, Table S5) (De Bie et al 2006; Rawlings et al 2006; Cantarel et al 2009). One significant gene family contractions occurred during the divergence of animal pathogens in Cordycipitaceae with 101 contracted families of CAZymes and 29 of MEROPS.…”

Comparative study of genome-wide plant biomass-degrading CAZymes in white rot, brown rot and soft rot fungi

“…Present-day CAZy database comprises of 145 GHs, 104 GTs, 27 PL, 16 CEs, 13 AA and 81 carbohydrate binding modules (Cantarel et al 2009; Lombard et al 2013). Further to this classification, GH classes GH-5, GH-13, GH-30, GH-43 are further divided into 53, 42, 8, 37 subfamilies respectively (Henrissat 1991; Henrissat and Davies 1997).…”

Haemophilus parasuis α-2,3-sialyltransferase-mediated lipooligosaccharide sialylation contributes to bacterial pathogenicity

“…Commonly, the sialyltransferase has been classified into α-2,3-sialyltransferase, α-2,6-sialyltransferase and α-2,8-sialyltransferase [18]. Based on their protein sequence homology, all the sialyltransferases identified to date could be divided into six glycosyltransferase (GT) families GT4, GT29, GT38, GT42, GT52 and GT80 according to the Carbohydrate-Active enZymes (CAZy) (http://www.cazy.org/) database [19]. Noticeably, all sialyltransferases from eukaryotes and some viruses are grouped into GT29 families, while bacterial sialyltransferases are grouped into GT4, GT38, GT42, GT52 and GT80 families [18].…”