WAWABILITY July 11–12, 2025 Washington DC. Big ideas. Bold Progress. Global Impact. Powered by TDIforAccess.
WAWABILITY July 11–12, 2025 Washington DC. Big ideas. Bold Progress. Global Impact. Powered by TDIforAccess.

B-P.18: Rhea, a FAIR resource of expert curated biochemical and transport reactions

Keywords

reactions, enzymes database, curation, bioinformatics, open data
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Despite the central role of biochemical reactions in life, reaction knowledge remains fragmented across databases, inconsistently described, and often not interoperable. This limits accurate enzyme annotation, integration across resources, and downstream applications such as pathway reconstruction, enzyme function prediction, and metabolic network analysis. Rhea (www.rhea-db.org) addresses this challenge by providing an expert-curated, FAIR resource of biochemical and transport reactions from the literature that is grounded in the ChEBI ontology and fully mapped to UniProtKB. Rhea includes over 18,500 reactions covering primary and secondary metabolism of a broad range of taxa, including reactions of the enzyme classification of the IUBMB and thousands more. Rhea has been adopted as the reference vocabulary for the annotation of enzymes and transporters in UniProtKB, covering over 25 million protein sequences, and provides reaction chemistry for resources such as the Gene Ontology (GO), Reactome, Model Organism Databases (MODs), SwissLipids, and the metabolic modeling platform MetaNetX. All Rhea data is freely available to query and download from our website and APIs, including our SPARQL endpoint, and is now widely used to develop methods for enzyme function prediction, protein design, and pathway reconstruction, and the annotation of metabolic networks, metagenomes, and environmental biotransformations. Here we present recent developments in Rhea, including improvements in reaction coverage, integration with the GO, curation workflows that integrate AI to accelerate coverage of novel enzyme functions and "de-orphan" enzymes, and new visualizations of reaction chemistry for experts and non-experts alike. Co-authors: Kristian B. Axelsen, Lucila Aimo, Nevila Hyka-Nouspikel, Parit Bansal, Teresa Batista Neto, Edouard de Castro, Nicole Redaschi, Alan Bridge

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