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 Hof ...
: ''ZINC is not commercial'') is a curated collection of commercially available
chemical compounds 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, a multicellular organism, or a community of interacting populations. They usually speciali ...
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 ...
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 sympto ...
,
biotechnology companies, and
research universities.
Scope and access
ZINC is different from other
chemical databases 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 bio ...
.
Curation and updates
ZINC is updated regularly and may be downloaded and used
free of charge. 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 co ...
.
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 o ...
a database of small molecules from the chemical and biological literature, hosted by
NCBI
*
ChEMBL, a database of information about medicinal chemistry and biological activities of small molecules.
External links
ZINC database
{{DEFAULTSORT:Zinc Database
Chemical databases
Biological databases