AromaDeg, a novel database for phylogenomics of aerobic bacterial degradation of aromatics

Understanding prokaryotic transformation of recalcitrant pollutants and the in-situ metabolic nets require the integration of massive amounts of biological data. Decades of biochemical studies together with novel next-generation sequencing data have exponentially increased information on aerobic aromatic degradation pathways. However, the majority of protein sequences in public databases have not been experimentally characterized and homology-based methods are still the most routinely used approach to assign protein function, allowing the propagation of misannotations. AromaDeg is a web-based resource targeting aerobic degradation of aromatics that comprises recently updated (September 2013) and manually curated databases constructed based on a phylogenomic approach. Grounded in phylogenetic analyses of protein sequences of key catabolic protein families and of proteins of documented function, AromaDeg allows query and data mining of novel genomic, metagenomic or metatranscriptomic data sets. Essentially, each query sequence that match a given protein family of AromaDeg is associated to a specific cluster of a given phylogenetic tree and further function annotation and/or substrate specificity may be inferred from the neighboring cluster members with experimentally validated function. This allows a detailed characterization of individual protein superfamilies as well as high-throughput functional classifications. Thus, AromaDeg addresses the deficiencies of homology-based protein function prediction, combining phylogenetic tree construction and integration of experimental data to obtain more accurate annotations of new biological data related to aerobic aromatic biodegradation pathways. We pursue in future the expansion of AromaDeg to other enzyme families involved in aromatic degradation and its regular update. Database URL: http://aromadeg.siona.helmholtz-hzi.de