Section: New Software and Platforms

Norine – A resource for nonribosomal peptides

Software web site: http://bioinfo.lille.inria.fr/norine/

Objective: Norine is a public computational resource that contains a database of NRPs with a web interface and dedicated tools, such as a 2D graph viewer and editor for peptides or comparison of NRPs. Norine was created and is maintained by members of Bonsai team, in tight collaboration with members of the ProBioGEM lab, a microbial laboratory of Lille1 University. Since its creation in 2006, Norine has gained an international recognition as the unique database dedicated to non-ribosomal peptides because of its high quality and manually curated annotations, and has been selected by wwPDB as a reference database. It is queried from all around the world by biologists or biochemists. It receives more than 3000 queries per month.

To enhance the Norine resource, we have recently developed a new module, named MyNorine, which is an open interface for biologists and biochemists dedicated to the submission of new non-ribosomal peptides in Norine database. Up to now, peptides were manually inputted and verified before being added in the database, which could potentially lead to human errors. The goal of MyNorine is to help users during the submission of peptides and monomers, by guiding them during all steps. For that, users, all over the world, can create an account on MyNorine. Thus, they contribute to the Norine resource and become curators (author of a peptide entry is mentioned in the corresponding page of Norine). Submitted peptides/monomers are validated, through a workflow process, by Norine team members, to ensure correct and consistent entries.