BindingDB: An Open Knowledgebase of Protein-Small Molecule Interactions

Summary/Abstract The present equipment request is designed to support the NIH-funded BindingDB project. The equipment will make the BindingDB website and database faster and more reliable, so that researchers can make optimal use of BindingDB’s massive data collection. The purpose of BindingDB is described below. Medications are organic compounds that bind specific proteins in the human body, and researchers in universities, government labs, and pharmaceutical companies, are constantly at work seeking such compounds. These ongoing efforts generate a continuous flow of information about what small molecules bind what proteins, and how tightly. Scientists can learn from this information and use it to guide the discovery of the latest generation of medications. However, this information is typically published only in scientific articles or patents, where it cannot easily be found or accessed by other researchers. BindingDB makes these data findable and far more usable by extracting them from patents and articles and placing them in a web-accessible database equipped with a range of search, download, and analysis tools. For BindingDB to be maximally useful, this project also aims to maximize and, ultimately, certify, BindingDB’s responsiveness, reliability, and trustworthiness. The requested equipment will strongly support this aim.