Section: New Results

Representation and curation of biochemical reactions: Rhea

Rhea (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/rhea ) is a project developed in collaboration with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) and the European Institute for Bioinformatics (EBI). It aims at providing a comprehensive resource of expert-curated biochemical reactions. Rhea provides a non-redundant set of chemical transformations for use in a broad spectrum of applications, including metabolic network reconstruction and pathway inference. Rhea includes enzyme-catalysed reactions (covering the IUBMB Enzyme Nomenclature list), transport reactions and spontaneously occurring reactions. Rhea reactions are described using chemical species from the Chemical Entities of Biological Interest ontology (ChEBI) and are stoichiometrically balanced for mass and charge. They are extensively manually curated with links to source literature and other public resources on metabolism including enzyme and pathway databases. This cross-referencing facilitates the mapping and reconciliation of common reactions and compounds between distinct resources, which is a common first step in the reconstruction of genome scale metabolic networks and models. The complete description of the database will appear in the Jan. 2012 NAR Database issue [5] .