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Probes & Drugs portal: an interactive, open data resource for chemical biology

Nature Methods volume 14, pages 759–760 (2017)Cite this article

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To the Editor:

We report the Probes & Drugs (P&D) portal (https://www.probes-drugs.org), a powerful tool for the exploration of bioactive compound space. Chemical probes are indispensable tools in modern biology. These compounds are commonly used to study gene function, validate molecular targets or dissect complex processes within cells and organisms1,2,3. Unlike drugs, which are effective, bioavailable and safe compounds, a probe's main attributes reside in its potency, selectivity and well-defined mechanism of action. Yet identifying chemical probes that meet all the demands of an experimental design is not a trivial task. Information on candidate probes and their potency, mechanism of action or availability is typically scattered over various sources; and gathering such information can be very time consuming. In some cases, probe annotations may even be out of date, and this propagates the continued selection of probes in which the biological characteristics have been disproven and their suitability questioned4,5. Many of these compounds remain incorporated in commercial screening libraries and continue to be used by the community5,6.

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Figure 1: Overview of the Probes & Drugs portal.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Baell for editing the PAINS filters and J. Baell and T. Epp for critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (NPU I–LO1220 to P.B.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CZ-OPENSCREEN: National Infrastructure for Chemical Biology, Institute of Molecular Genetics AS CR, v. v. i., Prague, Czech Republic

    Ctibor Skuta, Martin Popr, Tomas Muller, Jindrich Jindrich, Michal Kahle, David Sedlak, Daniel Svozil & Petr Bartunek

  2. Department of Organic Chemistry, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jindrich Jindrich

  3. Laboratory of Informatics and Chemistry, Faculty of Chemical Technology, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Daniel Svozil

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  1. Ctibor Skuta
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Correspondence to Petr Bartunek.

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Skuta, C., Popr, M., Muller, T. et al. Probes & Drugs portal: an interactive, open data resource for chemical biology. Nat Methods 14, 759–760 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.4365

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