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

The Carbohydrate-Active Enzymes database (CAZy) is a curated, knowledge-based resource dedicated to the enzymes that build and break down complex carbohydrates and glycoconjugates. It organizes these enzymes into families, including glycoside hydrolases, glycosyltransferases, polysaccharide lyases, carbohydrate esterases, and carbohydrate-binding modules, that are created from experimentally characterized proteins and populated with similar sequences from public databases, with biochemical information continuously curated from the literature and structural data.

By September 2008 the database covered thousands of proteins with assigned EC numbers and hundreds with known PDB structures, and its classification captures structural features better than substrate specificity alone, reveals evolutionary relationships, and provides a framework for understanding mechanism. Available to the scientific community for over a decade, CAZy supplied a shared nomenclature for glycobiologists and improved the quality of functional predictions in genome projects through expert annotation.