ChEBI – an Open-access Chemistry Resource for the Life Sciences:*Facilities for On-line Submission and Curation

Abstract

AbstractChEBI (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) is a database of ‘small’ molecular entities structured around a chemical ontology. It contains almost 600,000 entries, of which approximately 20,000 have been manually curated, as well as entries for groups (parts of molecular entities) and classes of entities. It provides a wide range of information such as chemical nomenclature, structures and related chemical values, and establishes interrelationships between entities in the ontology, in terms of both structure and role. ChEBI places a strong focus on quality, with exceptional efforts being applied to upholding IUPAC nomenclature recommendations and best IUPAC practices when drawing chemical structures.To invite the community to participate more directly in the future growth and development of ChEBI, we have developed a web-based software utility to enable direct user submissions. Users are encouraged to carry out as much of their own manual curation as possible, e.g. by adding multiple synonyms and database cross-references, and by creating multiple relationships within the ontology. The submissions are automatically validated for uniqueness (both of name and chemical structure) and correctness (such as checking that no non-allowed cycles have inadvertently been created in the ontology graph structure, and that the ontology relationships which have been specified are allowed between entities of the relevant types). Once a submission has passed the required validations, it is submitted to the ChEBI database, at which time it receives its unique ChEBI identifier. It will then become visible to the public (as a preliminary entry) as part of the monthly ChEBI release. To date, ChEBI has received over 750 such external submissions.