BindingDB
is a public, web-accessible database of measured binding affinities, focusing chiefly on the interactions of proteins considered to be candidate drug-targets with ligands that are small, drug-like molecules. As of March, 2011, BindingDB contains about 650,000 binding data, for 5,700 protein targets and 280,000 small molecules. BindingDB also includes a small collection of
host–guest binding data of interest to chemists studying supramolecular systems.
The purpose of BindingDB is to support medicinal chemistry and drug discovery via literature awareness and development of structure-activity relations (SAR and QSAR); validation of
computational chemistry
Computational chemistry is a branch of chemistry that uses computer simulations to assist in solving chemical problems. It uses methods of theoretical chemistry incorporated into computer programs to calculate the structures and properties of mol ...
and
molecular modelling
Molecular modelling encompasses all methods, theoretical and computational, used to model or mimic the behaviour of molecules. The methods are used in the fields of computational chemistry, drug design, computational biology and materials scien ...
approaches such as
docking, scoring and free energy methods; chemical biology and chemical genomics; and basic studies of the physical chemistry of
molecular recognition
Supramolecular chemistry refers to the branch of chemistry concerning Chemical species, chemical systems composed of a integer, discrete number of molecules. The strength of the forces responsible for spatial organization of the system range from w ...
.
The data collection derives from a variety of measurement techniques, including enzyme inhibition and kinetics, isothermal titration calorimetry, NMR, and radioligand and competition assays. BindingDB includes data extracted from the scientific literature by the BindingDB project, selected
PubChem
PubChem is a database of Chemistry, chemical molecules and their activities against biological assays. The system is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a component of the National Library of Medicine, which ...
confirmatory BioAssays, and
ChEMBL entries for which a well-defined protein target ("TARGET_TYPE='PROTEIN'") is provided.
History and Funding
The BindingDB project was conceived in the mid-1990s, based upon recognition of the broad value of quantitative affinity data and the inadequacy of journal articles as a means of making these data accessible. A
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...
-sponsored workshop in September 1997 validated the concept, and funding from the
NSF
NSF may stand for:
Political organizations
*National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party
*NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party
* National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political g ...
and NIST enabled initial development of the database with a collection of data for systems of many types, including protein-ligand, protein-protein, and host–guest binding. However, hopes that the database would be populated primarily through depositions by experimentalists were not borne out, and it became clear that the project would have to take responsibility for extracting data from the literature. Given the vastness of the molecular recognition literature and limitations in available resources, this meant that creating a useful database would require limiting attention to a well-defined set of high-value binding data.
The decision was taken to focus on binding data for small molecules with proteins that are drug-targets, or potential drug-targets, and for which the three-dimensional structure is available in the PDB or can potentially be modeled to high accuracy based upon the structure of a similar protein. This choice would aid drug-discovery for the selected targets, as well as the development of both ligand-based and structure-based methods of computational ligand-design. This is the current focus of BindingDB, which is led b
Michael Gilson based at
UC San Diego
The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Sc ...
's
Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and supported by a grant from the
NIH.
Capabilities
BindingDB's web-interface provides a range of browsing, query and data download tools. These include browsing by the name of a protein Target or by journal citation, query by chemical similarity and substructure, and downloads by target or query result.
See also
SAMPL Challenge
References
External links
BindingDB.orgBindingDB tutorial information and documentationVideo tutorials for basic BindingDB tasks{dead link, date=November 2016 , bot=InternetArchiveBot , fix-attempted=yes
Medicinal chemistry
Biological databases