The ZINC database (
recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...
: ''ZINC is not commercial'') is a curated collection of commercially available
chemical compounds
A chemical compound is a chemical substance composed of many identical molecules (or molecular entities) containing atoms from more than one chemical element held together by chemical bonds. A molecule consisting of atoms of only one element ...
prepared especially for
virtual screening
Virtual screening (VS) is a computational technique used in drug discovery to search libraries of small molecules in order to identify those structures which are most likely to bind to a drug target, typically a protein receptor or enzyme.
Virt ...
. ZINC is used by investigators (generally people with training as
biologist
A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...
s or
chemist
A chemist (from Greek ''chēm(ía)'' alchemy; replacing ''chymist'' from Medieval Latin ''alchemist'') is a scientist trained in the study of chemistry. Chemists study the composition of matter and its properties. Chemists carefully describe t ...
s) in
pharmaceutical companies
The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
,
biotechnology companies, and
research universities
A research university or a research-intensive university is a university that is committed to research as a central part of its mission. They are the most important sites at which knowledge production occurs, along with "intergenerational kn ...
.
Scope and access
ZINC is different from other
chemical databases
A chemical database is a database specifically designed to store chemical information. This information is about chemical and crystal structures, spectra, reactions and syntheses, and thermophysical data.
Types of chemical databases
Bioactivi ...
because it aims to represent the biologically relevant, three dimensional form of the
molecule
A molecule is a group of two or more atoms held together by attractive forces known as chemical bonds; depending on context, the term may or may not include ions which satisfy this criterion. In quantum physics, organic chemistry, and bioche ...
.
Curation and updates
ZINC is updated regularly and may be downloaded and used
free of charge
The English adjective ''free'' is commonly used in one of two meanings: "at no monetary cost" (''gratis'') and "with little or no restriction" (''libre''). This ambiguity of ''free'' can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it ...
. It is developed by John Irwin in the Shoichet Laboratory in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the
University of California, San Francisco
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It con ...
.
Version
The latest release of the website interface is "ZINC 15" (2015). The previous website was at ZINC, but the maintainers recommend moving to ZINC15 because of its better search capabilities. The database contents are continuously updated.
See also
*
PubChem
PubChem is a database of chemical molecules and their activities against biological assays. The system is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a component of the National Library of Medicine, which is part of ...
a database of small molecules from the chemical and biological literature, hosted by
NCBI
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is part of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), a branch of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It is approved and funded by the government of the United States. The ...
*
ChEMBL
ChEMBL or ChEMBLdb is a manually curated chemical database of bioactive molecules with drug-like properties.
It is maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory ( EMBL), based at the Wel ...
, a database of information about medicinal chemistry and biological activities of small molecules.
External links
ZINC database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zinc Database
Chemical databases
Biological databases