Welcome to STRENDA

There was a young lady called BRENDA^*,
and I tried to find data to send her,
but she said "It's no good,
and I think that you should
send me stuff that's consistent with STRENDA
(Athel Cornish-Bowden, Feb. 2004)

Whilst checking the database BRENDA
for the results that I wanted to send ya’
the file was quite bare
no details were there
and that’s the reason for STRENDA
(Allan Dunn, Apr. 2006)

Overview

STRENDA is a Commission created by the Beilstein Institute. The name represents Standards for Reporting Enzymology Data. The STRENDA Commission has been constituted in Frankfurt/Main (Germany) in February 2004. This web site describes its objectives.

Large amounts of published data are available on the behaviour of individual enzymes, but even a cursory examination of the literature will reveal that these were often collected under quite disparate conditions, of pH, temperature, ionic strength etc. Furthermore, full details of the assay conditions that were used are often lacking.

These problems often make it difficult for researchers to compare the behaviour of a single enzyme in different species or tissues by collating different publications. The difficulties are often further compounded by the lack of any statistical data on the parameters reported. When the values differ by orders of magnitude, as they do for example in comparisons between the hexokinase isoenzymes found in different tissues, lack of knowledge about the precision of the reported values may not matter very much; but in comparing enzymes between species the values may only differ by a few percent, and in such cases an unknown degree of imprecision may completely hide whatever effect one is trying to see.

The difficulties become even more acute for those wishing to use published data to model the behaviour of metabolic systems, cellular behaviour and the interaction of cells within tissues and organs.

We have recently described these difficulties more fully (Trends Biochem. Sci., 2005: 30:11-12; PMID: 15653320), and the STRENDA Commission, in consultation with the wider scientific community, plans to address them, in the hope that future publications will more readily yield the sort of information that researchers hope to find.

The STRENDA commission is accompanied by ESCEC. ESCEC stands for Experimental Standard Conditions of Enzyme Characterizations" and is the name for an upcoming series of symposia on which the results of the brain storming within the STRENDA group will be presented and discussed and the members of the committee will be in direct touch with interested parts of the scientific community.

Both, the ESCEC symposium and forthcoming ESCEC meetings, as well as, the work of the STRENDA Commission are organized, coordinated and financially supported by the Beilstein Institut.