Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

ChemDB is a chemical database containing nearly 5M commercially available small molecules, important for use as synthetic building blocks, probes in systems biology and as leads for the discovery of drugs and other useful compounds. The data is publicly available over the web for download and for targeted searches using a variety of powerful methods. The chemical data includes predicted or experimentally determined physicochemical properties, such as 3D structure, melting temperature and solubility. Recent developments include optimization of chemical structure (and substructure) retrieval algorithms, enabling full database searches in less than a second. A text-based search engine allows efficient searching of compounds based on over 65M annotations from over 150 vendors. When searching for chemicals by name, fuzzy text matching capabilities yield productive results even when the correct spelling of a chemical name is unknown, taking advantage of both systematic and common names. Finally, built in reaction models enable searches through virtual chemical space, consisting of hypothetical products readily synthesizable from the building blocks in ChemDB.
AVAILABILITY: ChemDB and Supplementary Materials are available at http://cdb.ics.uci.edu.
SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

MOTIVATION: The development of chemoinformatics has been hampered by the lack of large, publicly available, comprehensive repositories of molecules, in particular of small molecules. Small molecules play a fundamental role in organic chemistry and biology. They can be used as combinatorial building blocks for chemical synthesis, as molecular probes in chemical genomics and systems biology, and for the screening and discovery of new drugs and other useful compounds.
RESULTS: We describe ChemDB, a public database of small molecules available on the Web. ChemDB is built using the digital catalogs of over a hundred vendors and other public sources and is annotated with information derived from these sources as well as from computational methods, such as predicted solubility and three-dimensional structure. It supports multiple molecular formats and is periodically updated, automatically whenever possible. The current version of the database contains approximately 4.1 million commercially available compounds and 8.2 million counting isomers. The database includes a user-friendly graphical interface, chemical reactions capabilities, as well as unique search capabilities.
AVAILABILITY: Database and datasets are available on http://cdb.ics.uci.edu.