Welcome to the BMS!
The Biological Metal Centers Spectroscopy Platform – BMS – is a scientific database for students, researchers and scholars focused on Metalloproteins and Biospectroscopy. It aims to integrate the available information on the metal centers found in proteins, their structure, ligands and electronic properties, with respective spectroscopic information.
Metal Centers play vital roles in proteins and in Nature. Coordinated by the aminoacids from the polypeptide chain, they serve not only as structural elements but also as key components for metalloproteins’ biological functions (eg. electron transfer), especially in the case of metalloenzymes, where they allow many biologically relevant reactions to occur. Also, these metals are often incorporated in molecules different from the aminoacids of the proteins, forming co-factors, such as hemes (eg. hemoglobin), that are bound to the protein, becoming responsible for their function.
This Metal Centers database was designed, developed, and is supported by researchers from ITQB NOVA, namely from the “Functional Biochemistry of Metalloenzymes”, the “Inorganic Biochemistry and NMR” and the “Raman Biospectroscopy” research groups and is the result of the TIMB3 project: “Twin to Illuminate Metal in Biology and Biocatalysis Through Biospectroscopy. This work was funded by Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 810856.
You are welcome to contribute to BMS with a new cofactor/center data. Please fill and submit the form available here. The submitted data will be published after scientific verification by one of the BMS administrators.