Target, chemical and bioactivity databases – integration is key

Various biological, chemical and bibliographic databases have grown tremendously in recent years with respect to both their diversity and size. In many cases, these databases have been established to address specific interests of their developers in biological or chemical systems with relatively little attention paid to the integration of different types of biological, chemical and literature data. Pharmaceutical industry increasingly relies on such databases for generating new ideas for identifying potential drug candidates and their targets. In this paper, we present a brief overview of many available public and commercial databases that contain information on biological targets or small molecule ligands as well as several integrated databases. We emphasize the database integration and federation as most important current trends in informatics driven pharmaceutical discovery.

Section editors:Tudor Oprea – University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque, USAAlex Tropsha – University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA