Section: New Results

Nonribosomal peptides

Norine is the unique and leading platform dedicated to computational biology analysis of nonribosomal peptides (NRPs). It is used by thousands of scientists all over the world to explore and better understand the diversity of the NRPs. To improve the data quality and quantity in Norine, we are now opening our resource to external contributors. To achieve this new challenge, we developed new tools (MyNorine, s2m) and communicate on our novelties.

• Crowdsourcing. To facilitate the submission of new nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) or modification of stored ones in Norine, we have developed a dedicated and user-friendly module named MyNorine [2] . It provides interactive forms to fill in the annotations with, for example, auto-completion and tools such as a monomeric structure editor. It has especially been designed for biologists and biochemists working on secondary metabolites to easily enrich the database with their own data.

• Norine communication. We advertise Norine by different promoting media. We organized an international workshop in Lille in October to teach biologists and biochemists how to annotate NRPs and their synthetases with bioinformatics tools such as Norine. It attracted 32 attendees from 8 countries. We participated, as invited contributors, to the special issue "Bioinformatics tools and approaches for synthetic biology" of the new journal Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology edited by KeAi Publishing, funded by Elsevier and Chinese Science Publishing & Media. Our article [6] describes the usefulness of Norine to discover novel nonribosomal peptides, with examples of biological results obtained thanks to Norine tools. More than 20 NRPs have already been submitted since September, proving the efficiency of our communication and usefulness and relevancy of Norine.

• Monomeric structure. The tool Smiles2Monomers (abbreviated s2m) infers efficiently and accurately the monomeric structure of a polymer from its chemical structure [1] . It is provided to the scientific community through the Norine website for on-line run or for download. Beside its utility to facilitate the annotation of new peptides, it allowed us to detect annotation errors in the Norine database.