Everyone is talking about "digitisation". More than 30 years ago, however, Professor Dietmar Schomburg, who now holds a Lower Saxony professorship at the Braunschweig Centre for Systems Biology (BRICS), was not able to understand his vision: "I dreamed of a scientific database that everyone could access at any time. It should contain the most important properties of thousands of enzymes, a building block of life". At theat time, the Internet was not part of everyday life, scientific articles were found in thick books in libraries, and scientists wrote letters instead of e-mails.
In the meantime, progress is no longer conceivable without databases - there are thousands of them. You can do long research and lose track of things. That's why there are so-called core databases or "core data resources" that are classified as indispensable. An international panel of experts spent 18 months analysing databases and selecting some of these "core databases". BRENDA, short for "BRaunschweiger ENzym-DAtenbank" and Schomburg's pride and joy, is now one of them.
BRENDA Homeage