DATABASICS: Looking at small molecules

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—Researchers at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT recently announced the release of ChemBank 2.0, an upgrade of the Internet-based publicly available repository of chem- and bioinformatic data about biologically relevant small molecules. At present, it contains more than 16 million measurements about over 700,000 small molecules.

"By connecting many aspects of biology and medicine with many drug candidates, ChemBank helps the drug-hunting community become more than the sum of its parts," said Dr. Stuart Schreiber, director of the Initiative for Chemical Genetics (ICG), the platform behind ChemBank's release. "ChemBank is essentially a matrix linking many different small molecules with many states of cells—from healthy to diseased."

Using a variety of freely available software tools, researchers can plumb the depths of ChemBank to identify and use information relevant to their own research into human disease and drug discovery. Version 2.0 incorporates many new search and datamining operations and offers enhanced integration with the National Cancer Institute's caBIG informatics grid. Further enhancements will involve the addition of data from proteomics, RNAi screening, and microscopy experiments.