Antony Williams introduces the concept of online public compound databases, highlighting ChemSpider's extensive collection of over 25 million compounds. He discusses the challenges of finding accurate chemical data on the internet and the limitations of various databases, both public and proprietary. The document emphasizes the need for quality curation and the role of crowdsourcing in improving the reliability of chemical information online.

1. Online Public Compound Databases Antony Williams

2. Introductions…. Hi….I’m Antony Williams, ChemSpiderman NMR Spectroscopist by training Worked in gov’t lab, academia, Fortune 500, start-up, founded ChemSpider, now work for the Royal Society of Chemistry I am the host of ChemSpider… 25 million compounds Linked to 400 data sources You’ll hear more….

3. What’s your interest in Public Compound DBs ? What public compound databases do you use? What are you looking to find? What proprietary databases do you presently use? What do you trust? Why are for-fee databases not enough? What issues do you have with free chemistry databases/resources online? What would the ideal solution provide????

4. Content is King and Quality Costs Chemistry “content” is big money Patent searching Structures and properties Drug databases Literature databases Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the “Gold Standard” in Chemistry related information 103 years of content $260 million revenue (2006) >50 million substances >60 million sequences

5. What’s the Status of Chemistry online? Encyclopedic articles (Wikipedia) Chemical vendor databases (eMolecules) Metabolic pathway databases (WikiPathways) Virtual Screening databases (ZINC DB) Property databases (Beilstein) Screening assay results (PubChem) Patents with chemical structures (SureChem) ADME/Tox data (OEChem) Scientific publications (Many publishers) Compound aggregators (ChemSpider) Blogs/Wikis and Open Notebook Science (Many)

6. Synthesis Blogs…TotallySynthetic.com

7. Org Prep Daily

8. Molbank (Open Access Journal)

9. Synthetic Pages (Website)

10. Lots of “Public Compound” Databases PubChem Drugbank ChEBI/ChEMBL KEGG LipidMAPs ChemIDPlus eMolecules ZINC ChemSpider Lots of chemical vendors What’s missing??? What do you use online?

11. Where Would You look? What Do You Trust?

12. Linked Data on the Web Taken from: Rafael Sidis’ Blog

13. What is a compound?

14. Connections Can Lead Anywhere

15. Where Would You look? What Do You Trust?

16. PubChem

17. PubChem PubChem is “a repository of screening data” BUT, publishers, vendors, lots of chemical data holders..almost 30 million compounds Properties, 3D optimized structures, links to various databases, chemical names, registry numbers, synonyms, trade names PubChem is a repository – non-curated, no way to annotate or clean data. Data are free, not “open”

18. LIVE DEMO of PubChem Name a chemical compound – search and review Next slides: Methane… Diamond Vancomycin Taxol Cholesterol

19. Chemistry on The Internet Is Messy

20. It’s Methane…

21. What’s Methane?

22. What’s Methane?

23. What ELSE is Methane???

24. The Challenges of Internet Data Text-based searches commonly will get you to “representative data” Accurate chemical structures are hard to find! Wikipedia IS a good source of accurate chemistry data..not perfect but good. See Tacrolimus Tell the story of Domoic Acid – Next Slide

25. The EXPERTS must get it right?!

26. Wikipedia, C&E News, PubChem C&E News (from ACS)

27. Feedback from Steve Ritter “ As for where we source our structures, our primary source is the researcher and peer-reviewed papers , because many compounds are novel. ..we always double check them against one or more primary sources, typically Merck Index and SciFinder. Although CAS and C&EN are both part of the ACS Publications Division, we at C&EN still have to pay for our SciFinder access, strangely enough.”

28. Feedback from Steve Ritter “ As a rule, we at C&EN don’t use Wikipedia as a primary source for structures or chemical information, and I recommend that policy to anyone .” “ It would be nice to have an authoritative web-based source of standard, well-drawn structures for chemists to go to so they can freely cut and paste structures into their papers, PowerPoint presentations, and anything else they might need. Maybe Wikipedia will be that source one day .”

29. The Challenges of Internet Data Text-based searches commonly will get you to “representative data” Accurate chemical structures are hard to find! Wikipedia IS a good source of accurate chemistry data..not perfect but good. See Tacrolimus Tell the story of Domoic Acid Unfortunately, question everything 

30. Question Everything online: www.dhmo.org

31. The FDA’s DailyMed

32. Structures on DailyMed

33. Lack of Stereochemistry

34. Does Stereochemistry Matter?

35. Does one stereocenter matter? Distaval, Talimol, Nibrol, Sedimide, Quietoplex, Contergan, Neurosedyn, and Softenon

36. Does one stereocenter matter? Distaval, Talimol, Nibrol, Sedimide, Quietoplex, Contergan, Neurosedyn, Softenon, Thalidomide

37. Incorrect Structures

38. Wow!

39. Collaborative Knowledge Management

40. Taxol on PubChem

41. Drugbank

42. Digitonin? More Crowdsourcing…

43. Comments on the Blog September 15th, 2009 at 1:57 pm It looks like both ChEBI and Wikipedia structures are wrong as far as aglycon is concerned. According to http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/20330/abstract “… for the first time to confirm beyond all doubt the structure suggested by Tschesche and Wulff for digitonin by means of modern NMR techniques, and to assign all proton and carbon resonances.” Structure 1 shows methyl group at C-20 going UP, i.e. 20β (while by default spirostan is 20α).

44. CAS as an authority

45. The Blogging Community Participate

46. Will it ever end? The community says the structure of digitonin has “up” 20-Methyl. If so, then multiple substances related to digitonin have OPPOSITE stereo at 20-Methyl The spirostane skeleton is considered to have a “down” Methyl group so all spirostane-related structures would be wrong The ACD/Dictionary has 24 structures with close skeleton and all have the “down” Methyl group.

47. Chemistry is REALLY Messy

48. Vancomycin Who will curate? How would you clean such a large dataset? Assertions!!!

49. An Introduction to the InChI Identifier

50. Multiple Layers

51. InChIStrings Hash to InChIKeys

52. InChIs for Taxol

53. Back to Taxol DrugBank: RCINICONZNJXQF-CLDWUXIMDD ChEBI: RCINICONZNJXQF-GXKQXQCDDN Wikipedia: RCINICONZNJXQF-MZXODVADBJ Which one is correct???

54. Vancomycin – Search the Internet

55. Full Molecule Search: 4 Hits

56. Full Skeleton Search: 104 Hits

57. Vancomycin on ChemSpider 1 compound – 3 days

58. Assertion and Chemical Entities Who says what Taxol is? What is the “timeline” for a molecule? How do we clean up the Public data?

59. InChIKeys for Taxol DrugBank: RCINICONZNJXQF-CLDWUXIMDD ChEBI: RCINICONZNJXQF-GXKQXQCDDN Wikipedia: RCINICONZNJXQF-MZXODVADBJ Structure validation is tough work! Who is validating chemistry data online???

60. Bio-Break Next Up – QUALITY CHOICES for online data An introduction to ChemSpider Crowdsourced Participation and Curation

61. Tony’s Quality Choices For Data Chemical Abstracts Service and Reaxys – not free but definitely high quality! Wikipedia Chemistry is good ChEBI (look for “starred” compounds to indicate manual curation) DSSTox – manually curated EPA database. Very high quality ChemIDPlus – ongoing curation and good quality The databases of David Wishart – manually curated. Good but not perfect – DrugBank, HMDB, FooDB and others

62. ChEBI: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/ Chemical Entities of Biological Interest from the European Bioinformatics Institute

63. DSSTox: http://www.epa.gov/comptox/dsstox/ Distributed Structure Searching for Toxicology from Ann Richards at the Environmental Protection Agency

64. ChemIDPlus – 350,000 Compounds http://chem.sis.nlm.nih.gov/chemidplus/

65. DrugBank: http://www.drugbank.ca/

66. And Our Own Work... ChemSpider ChemSpider is: Building a Structure Centric Community for Chemists >25 million compounds, >400 data sources A deposition and curation platform A publishing platform for the community Grows daily – more depositions, more links, more data sources

67. How Was ChemSpider Built? ChemSpider was a “hobby project” Housed in a basement and running off three servers – one bought, two built Sensitive to weather and power stability Went live at ACS Spring 2007 in Chicago

68. Search Cholesterol

69. Live DEMO ChemSpider demo…

70. Link off a structure in ChemSpider Chemical suppliers Other publications Analytical Data Related Reactions Wikipedia Patents “ Everything”

71. Answering Questions for Chemists Questions a chemist might ask… What is the melting point of n-butanol? What is the chemical structure of Xanax? Chemically, what is phenolphthalein? What are the stereocenters of cholesterol? Where can I find publications about xylene? What are the different trade names for Ketoconazole? What is the NMR spectrum of Aspirin? What are the safety handling issues for Thymol Blue?

72. Complex Data and Information

73. Crowd-sourcing Chemistry Curation Crowd-sourced curation: identify/tag errors, edit names, synonyms, identify records to deprecate

74. Multi-level Curation and Approval

75. ChemSpider SyntheticPages ChemSpider Synthesis will be a home for all things “synthetic” An online resource for synthetic procedures from blogs, other online resources, RSC supplementary info, other publishers etc. Public peer-review and feedback for synthetic procedures

76. ChemSpider Everywhere : Embed

77. ChemSpider Everywhere: Spectral Game

78. ChemSpider Everywhere Crowdsourced Curation of Spectra

79. ChemSpider Everywhere ChemMobi

80. Where is ChemSpider Lacking? More databases coming online monthly Quality of data remains the primary issue ChemSpider is limited to “defined chemicals”. No support for: Polymers Minerals Markush structures

81. It’s a long road ahead…

82. Conclusions The internet enables chemistry, at a reduced cost Web 2.0 is here and improving quality Question Quality! Crowdsourcing to expand, curate and integrate InChIs are enabling chemistry on the internet

83. Thank you [email_address] Twitter: ChemSpiderman www.chemspider.com/blog SLIDES: www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams