390 Int. J. Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2011 Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. LIPABASE: a database for ‘true’ lipase family enzymes Abdelmonaem Messaoudi*, Hatem Belguith, Imen Ghram and Jeannette Ben Hamida Unité de Protéomie Fonctionnelle and Biopréservation Alimentaire, Institut Supérieur des Sciences Biologiques Appliquées de Tunis, Université Tunis El Manar, Rue Zouheir ESSAFI 1007, Tunisie E-mail: amessaoudi@tvtc.gov.sa E-mail: belguith.hatem@gmail.com E-mail: imen.ghram@gmail.com E-mail: benhamida_jeannette@yahoo.fr *Corresponding author Abstract: Lipase enzymes play an important role in lipid metabolism and are produced by a variety of species. Compared with animal, bacterial and fungal, little is known about plant lipases. Although lipases belong to many different protein families, they have the same architecture, the α/β-hydrolase fold and a conserved active site signature, the Gly-Xaa-Ser-Xaa-Gly motif. Several studies on enzymatic activity and interfacial activation phenomenon of lipases confirm the presence of consensus sequence and a conserved domain. Lipases can be divided into two main groups: • carboxylesterases (EC 3.1.1.1) • ‘true’ lipases (EC 3.1.1.3), which differ in several biochemical features, which allow us to develop a database that regroups all ‘true’ lipase proprieties to establish relationship between structure and function. LIPABASE is a centralised resource database, which provides information about ‘true’ lipase from different species. It includes general, taxonomic, physicochemical and molecular data. Access to LIPABASE is free and available at http://www.lipabase-pfba-tun.org Keywords: LIPABASE; lipase; database; true lipase; carboxylesterases; bioinformatics; clustering; GxSxG; conserved active site. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Messaoudi, A., Belguith, H., Ghram, I. and Ben Hamida, J. (2011) ‘LIPABASE: a database for ‘true’ lipase family enzymes’, Int. J. Bioinformatics Research and Applications, Vol. 7, No. 4, pp.390–401. Biographical notes: Abdelmonaem Messaoudi is a PhD Student in the Faculty of Mathematical, Physical and Natural Sciences of Tunis. He is pursuing his thesis work at the Functional Proteomics and Alimentary Bio-preservation Research Unit at the Institute of Applied Biological Sciences Tunis (ISSBAT). He gained his MS in Microbiology in 2006 and his MS in Bioinformatics in 2005 from The National School of Computer Sciences (Tunisia). His research interests are in the areas of bioinformatics, computational biology, proteomics and genomics.