NCBI numbers for May

A quick text search for "nitrile hydratase" under proteins on NCBI's website shows 2869 (+42 this month) hits for the phrase, and 1042 (+19 in the last month) RefSeq hits. It describes on the NCBI website how the RefSeq collection is their gold standard selection, so there has been high proportion of good stuff uploaded in the last month.

No change in the number of structures listed on the Protein Data Bank.

But which is more popular nitrilase or nitrile hydratase?

Google have a rather entertaining Google Labs product called the NGram viewer where they allow you to check the ranking of the number of times that books published in a specific year use words which you define. Their examples are like "nursery school" versus "kindergarten". I thought it might be rather more relevant for this blog to try "nitrilase" against "nitrile hydratase".

NGram viewer- nitrilase v nitrile hydratase

Basically nitrilase has been more popular apart from a burst of enthusiasm for NHase between 1988 and 1994, and a photofinish victory in 2003.

NCBI- April numbers for NHase

A quick text search for "nitrile hydratase" under proteins on NCBI's website shows 2827 (+150 in a month!) hits for the phrase, and 1023 (+35 since the start of March) RefSeq hits. The number of PDB hits is up 5 to 41, as a new crystal structure from the cobalt centred NHase from Pseudomona putida has been uploaded along with the data for four point mutants of it.

NCBI- March numbers for NHase

A quick text search for "nitrile hydratase" under proteins on NCBI's website shows 2677 (+5 since the start of February) hits for the phrase, and 988 (+3 since the start of February) RefSeq hits. The number of PDB hits is unchanged at 36.

NCBI

Every so often I do a quick and dirty search for the text string "nitrile hydratase" on the NCBI website under the "proteins" database tab. Just now there were 2672 proteins annotated thus, of which 985 were RefSeq. Obviously this double counts the number of enzymes (at least) because NHase is two subunit enzyme and this search doesnt distinguish between alpha and beta chains, and there are always some misannotated things... but maybe there are 400-1000 different nitrile hydratase sequences out there?
A similar text search of PDB gives 36 structures. Some are pretty similar and are plus/minus something in the active site. A rough trawl suggests that's about a dozen distinct structures.