ChemSpider Blog

MeSH is likely well known by anyone working in the Life Sciences and with Pubmed. As defined on Wikipedia

“Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a huge controlled vocabulary (or metadata system) for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database and by NLM’s catalog of book holdings.

…The 2005 version of MeSH contains a total of 22,568 subject headings, also known as descriptors. Most of these are accompanied by a short definition, links to related descriptors, and a list of synonyms or very similar terms (known as entry terms). Because of these synonym lists, MeSH can also be viewed as a thesaurus.”

We are presently moving further into integration with Pubmed and as part of this move we have decided to integrate MeSH information and the structure level onto relevent record views. Now, when you visit a particular record where MeSH information is available, the data will be visible under the MeSH tab, open by default.

MeSH has been curated by a highly skilled team over a number of years. More information about MeSH can be found online. The contents of the MeSH table should be self-explanatory. Over the next few weeks watch as we do more with the integration of MeSH and Pubmed.

Most people reading this blog will know that we are advocates of the InChI standard for structure representation. I am aware of the intentions to extend the InChI into the world of reaction Capture and look forward to testing it as it moves forward and providing feedback to the team. An announcement was made in the CSA Trust Newsletter and I’ve snipped it below.

“A project to develop a standard representation for chemical reactions was launched recently at a meeting in Berlin, Germany, hosted by René Deplanque of FIZ Chemie. The project is being led by Guenter Grethe.

The goal of this meeting was to develop the requirements for a proposal to be submitted to IUPAC to fund an Open Source, public domain ReactionML (IUPAC RML) standard to complement the IUPAC InChI chemical structure representation. The requirements would include what the community needs, technical and organisational issues and financial aspects.

The meeting was quite successful and an initial first stage of the project was agreed to and will include:

• Reactants
• Products
• Reagents
• Catalysts
• Solvents

All the chemical structure representation will be based on and build upon the IUPAC InChI/InChIKey standards, which, since its introduction in August 2006, has become the international chemical structure representation standard for all large databases of chemical data. Some of these databases containing InChIs are in excess of 36 million unique structures.

It is expected a beta test release version of this new IUPAC standard will be available for public testing by the end of 2008.”