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Updates to the ChEMBL FAQs

If you have a question about the data in ChEMBL you might consider visiting our FAQ page!  We have recently expanded and updated the FAQs; we have included more intuitive categories, mirroring the organisation of our data.  Enquiries are now sorted into general, assay and activity, drug and compound, target, document and data source, interface, download, and schema questions. We have added new answers, including to the questions: How are [protein] isoforms treated by ChEMBL? What are the parameters for the [structure] similarity search? Can you provide more details on ChEMBL releases? Does ChEMBL contain agrochemical data? Our FAQs are searchable, making it easy to navigate to your area of interest.  You can also find help with programmatic access to the database , and a guide to our web interface .   If you want to keep up to date with ChEMBL news and data releases you can subscribe to the Chembl-announce mailing list.   For any questions not answered by our FAQs, please email chemb
Recent posts

SureChEMBL user survey

  (Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 11 Janvier 2024 at 11:50 am)   Happy New Year everyone! You already know that we have been working extensively in the last few years to offer a new version of SureChEMBL that can deliver a better user experience. If you did not have the opportunity yet, you can still test the new UI and underlying system . Obviously it is still a beta version but new improvements are deployed weekly and 2024 should be exciting. As said at the announcement, one of the advantages of the new SureChEMBL is that we can finally develop new functionalities! We have a long list in our backlog but not enough time and resources to deliver them all immediately. This is why we would like to offer the SureChEMBL community a say on what we should implemented first. So please have a look at our survey . We gathered ideas that emerged over the last few years and you will be able to vote for what you think we should prioritise. You can also share your own idea if you wish. It should not ta

The ChEMBL team wishes a Merry Xmas 2023!

2023 has been a productive year for the ChEMBL team, with two separate releases of ChEMBL, an overhaul of the ChEBI data schema, and the release of the new SureChEMBL . We introduced some new features in ChEMBL, including a flag for Natural Products and Chemical Probes and updated our Natural Product-likeness score . Drug data in ChEMBL and drug warning information has been updated for ChEMBL 32. You can find more detailed information in our 2023 NAR update paper . Another focus this year was the improvement of documentation and processes to make data depostion for ChEMBL easier. The curation of data on assay parameters is a constannt endeavour in the team and has recently been described in two separate blog posts: one on the " AIDX " and another one on the perfect assay description . We have also been active by developing our own Nature Trail event on Campus highlighting some of the bioactive compounds from the flora and fauna found on-site and elsewhere. Now it is t

In search of the perfect assay description

Credit: Science biotech, CC BY-SA 4.0 Assays des cribe the experimental set-up when testing the activity of drug-like compounds against biological targets; they provide useful context for researchers interested in drug-target relationships. Ver sion 33 of ChEMBL contains 1.6 million diverse assays spanning ADMET, physicochemical, binding, functional and toxicity experiments. A set of well-defined and structured assay descriptions would be valuable for the drug discovery community, particularly for text mining and NLP projects. These would also support ChEMBL's ongoing efforts towards an  in vitro  assay classification. This Blog post will consider the features of the 'perfect' assay description and provide a guide for depositors on the submission of high quality data. ChEMBL's assays are typically structured with the overall aim, target, and method .  The ideal assay description is succinct but contains all the necessary information for easy interpretation by database u

New SureChEMBL announcement

(Generated with DALL-E 3 ∙ 30 October 2023 at 1:48 pm) We have some very exciting news to report: the new SureChEMBL is now available! Hooray! What is SureChEMBL, you may ask. Good question! In our portfolio of chemical biology services, alongside our established database of bioactivity data for drug-like molecules ChEMBL , our dictionary of annotated small molecule entities ChEBI , and our compound cross-referencing system UniChem , we also deliver a database of annotated patents! Almost 10 years ago , EMBL-EBI acquired the SureChem system of chemically annotated patents and made this freely accessible in the public domain as SureChEMBL. Since then, our team has continued to maintain and deliver SureChEMBL. However, this has become increasingly challenging due to the complexities of the underlying codebase. We were awarded a Wellcome Trust grant in 2021 to completely overhaul SureChEMBL, with a new UI, backend infrastructure, and new f