This has allowed assignment of newly-discovered catalytic activities before anything is known about the structures of the enzymes. The links to databases of genes and protein structure allow the relationships between functional and structural classifications to be more readily accessed. The system of naming enzymes in terms of reactions, rather than structures, is one that works far better for enzymes that act on relatively small molecules than for those that handle polymers. Because of this a rather different system is used for the nomenclature of peptidases. Information about new enzymes or corrections to existing entries may be reported directly from these web pages or by using the form printed in the back of of the 1992 edition of Enzyme Nomenclature.
All new material is considered by the committees before approval.
The nomenclature committees publish newletters from time to time in various journals of biochemistry as a way of drawing attention to new recommendations, revisions to existing ones, current problems that are being studied, and to make minor recommendations that are too small to demand a full-scale document. In the future the committees hope that many of these functions will be fulfilled by these web pages. Newsletters are available, and a list of useful contents from earlier Newsletters , which has links to extracts from several of them. In the past published recommendations were often described as Rules , but the present committees prefer to avoid this term as far as possible, replacing it with Recommendations , which expresses more accurately their status. Only journal editors have such authority, and follow nomenclature recommendations only to the extent that they choose to do so.