ZINC-22─A Free Multi-Billion-Scale Database of Tangible Compounds for Ligand Discovery
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Abstract
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Purchasable chemical space has grown rapidly into the tens of billions of molecules, providing unprecedented opportunities for ligand discovery but straining the tools that might exploit these molecules at scale. We have therefore developed ZINC-22, a database of commercially accessible small molecules derived from multi-billion-scale make-on-demand libraries. The new database and tools enable analog searching in this vast new space via a facile GUI, CartBlanche, drawing on similarity methods that scale sublinearly in the number of molecules. The new library also uses data organization methods, enabling rapid lookup of molecules and their physical properties, including conformations, partial atomic charges, c Log P values, and solvation energies, all crucial for molecule docking, which had become slow with older database organizations in previous versions of ZINC. As the libraries have continued to grow, we have been interested in finding whether molecular diversity has suffered, for instance, because certain scaffolds have come to dominate via easy analoging. This has not occurred thus far, and chemical diversity continues to grow with database size, with a log increase in Bemis–Murcko scaffolds for every two-log unit increase in database size. Most new scaffolds come from compounds with the highest heavy atom count. Finally, we consider the implications for databases like ZINC as the libraries grow toward and beyond the trillion-molecule range. ZINC is freely available to everyone and may be accessed at cartblanche22.docking.org, via Globus, and in the Amazon AWS and Oracle OCI clouds.
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- Lyu J.; Wang S.; Balius T. E.; Singh I.; Levit A.; Moroz Y. S.; O’Meara M. J.; Che T.; Algaa E.; Tolmachova K.; Tolmachev A. A.; Shoichet B. K.; Roth B. L.; Irwin J. J. Ultra-Large Library Docking for Discovering New Chemotypes. Nature 2019, 566, 224– 229. 10.1038/s41586-019-0917-9. 30728502 PMC6383769 · DOI · Paper page
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Quantum-Informed Molecular Representation Learning Enhancing ADMET Property Prediction
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Harnessing AlphaFold to reveal hERG channel conformational state secretsPreprint
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Considerations in Pursuing Reaction Scope Generality
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Machine learning for renewable energy advancements: Prospects and emerging techniques
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Exploring structure-based drug discovery of GPCRs beyond the orthosteric binding site
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Quantum-machine-assisted drug discovery
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Bridging chemistry and artificial intelligence by a reaction description language
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KNIME Workflows for Chemoinformatic Characterization of Chemical Databases
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A View on Molecular Complexity from the GDB Chemical Space
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Structure-based virtual screening of ultra-large chemical spaces: Advances and pitfalls
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Colorectal Cancer Detection via Metabolites and Machine Learning
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Multi‐View Biomedical Foundation Models for Molecule‐Target and Property Prediction
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From reactants to products: computational methods for biosynthetic pathway design
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Yin-yang in drug discovery: rethinking de novo design and development of predictive models
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Introducing SpaceGA: A Search Tool to Accelerate Large Virtual Screenings of Combinatorial Libraries
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Advancing active compound discovery for novel drug targets: insights from AI-driven approaches
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Vina-CUDA: An Efficient Program with in-Depth Utilization of GPU to Accelerate Molecular Docking
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- Authors
- Tingle, B. I., Tang, K. G., Castanon, M., Gutierrez, J. J., Khurelbaatar, M., Dandarchuluun, C., Moroz, Y. S., & Irwin, J. J.
- Affiliations
- University of California, San Francisco (US)
- Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (UA)
- Corresponding author
- Irwin, John J.
- Venue
- Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
- Publisher
- American Chemical Society (ACS)
- Published
- 2023-02-15
- Volume
- 63
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1166-1176
- ISSN
- 1549-9596 (ISSN-L)
- 1549-960X
- PMC
- PMC9976280
- OpenAlex
- W4320857994
- Cited by
- 314
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 122 · 2025: 106 · 2024: 62 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 1
- FWCI
- 44.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- ChemRxiv (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- National Institutes of Health (GM133836)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
- Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Machine Learning in Materials Science
- Physical Sciences › Chemistry › Organic Chemistry › Synthesis and Characterization of Heterocyclic Compounds
- Keywords
- chemical databases, similarity search, molecular docking, chemical diversity, Bemis-Murcko scaffolds, solvation energy, partial atomic charges, molecular conformation
- MeSH terms
- Ligands, Molecular Conformation, Zinc, Databases, Factual, Molecular Docking Simulation
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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