The Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme/Maturase data standard for capturing natural product biosynthesis

Natural products, also known as specialized or secondary metabolites, show extraordinary chemical diversity and potent biological activities. Their biosynthesis usually first encompasses scaffold generation, followed by additional tailoring and maturation steps, leading to the mature compound. The latter steps are often performed by accessory enzymes known as tailoring enzymes or maturases. While knowledge about reaction and substrate specificities of these enzymes is essential for natural product biosynthesis, it is often scattered in the literature, hampering understanding and computational processing. Here, we conceptualize the Minimum Information about a Tailoring Enzyme/Maturase (MITE) data standard. We envision this data standard to serve in collecting experimentally verified data on reaction, substrate specificity, and other metadata of tailoring enzymes. Closely associated with the previously established Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG) data standard, MITE will aim to capture tailoring enzyme reaction information that is currently not systemized. We anticipate that MITE will accelerate natural product structure predictions from sequence, evolutionary analyses of biosynthetic pathways and synthetic biology engineering of specialized metabolic pathways.