ChemSpider Blog

I’ve blogged recently about depositing the ChEBI Entities of the month onto ChemSpider. Duncan Hull asked me about how often we update our ChEBI collection and all ChEBI depositions found their way onto ChemSpider via PubChem. We have not updated since then despite the fact that the ChEBI dataset is being updated very regularly. We’re going to clean out our backlog of depositions before working on the ChEBI set.

That said, the news out of the EBI in Hinxton in this Press Release is very exciting. I’ll abstract from it here and point you to the press release for more details!

“The Wellcome Trust has awarded £4.7 million [€5.8 million] to EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute [EMBL-EBI] to support the transfer of a large collection of information on the properties and activities of drugs and a large set of drug-like small molecules from the publicly listed company Galapagos NV to the public domain. It will be incorporated into the EMBL-EBI’s collection of open-access data resources for biomedical research and will be maintained by a newly established team of scientists at the EMBL-EBI. ”

I’m very interested to hear more about what the dataset contains as the project moves forward!

Over the past few months we have recognized those people who have spent their time depositing to the content of ChemSpider either as depositors or curators. Recently I commented about one of our Advisory Group, Chris Singleton, taking on a major project to deposit spectral data to ChemSpider. If you visit the spectral data page and scroll through you will see that there are now 33 pages of spectra, each page containing 20 spectra. The majority of these are NMR spectra and the largest single collection is that deposited by Chris over the past few weeks. The data were those obtained from the Madison Metabolomics Consortium Database and described in a publication by Q. Cui, et al; “Metabolite identification via the Madison Metabolomics Consortium Database”, Nature Biotechnology, 26,162 (2008). Our sincere thanks to Chris for all of his work!

There is another raft of spectra waiting to be processed and deposited so the spectral data collection will continue to grow.