ZINC database
Database of chemical compounds
The ZINC database (recursive acronym: ZINC is not commercial) is a curated collection of commercially available chemical compounds prepared especially for virtual screening. ZINC is used by investigators (generally people with training as biologists or chemists) in pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and research universities.
01Scope and access
ZINC is different from other chemical databases because it aims to represent the biologically relevant, three dimensional form of the molecule.
02Curation 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.
03Version
The latest release of the website interface is "ZINC-22". The database is continuously updated and as of 2023 is claimed to contain over 37 billion commercially available molecules.
04Uses
The database is typically used for molecule mining, a process in which Quantitative structure-activity relationships are used to find new compounds with improved biological activity, given a known starting point found, for example, by high-throughput screening.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “ZINC database”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
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