Analysis of Commercial and Public Bioactivity Databases

Activity data for small molecules are invaluable in chemoinformatics. Various bioactivity databases exist containing detailed information of target proteins and quantitative binding data for small molecules extracted from journals and patents. In the current work, we have merged several public and commercial bioactivity databases into one bioactivity metabase. The molecular presentation, target information, and activity data of the vendor databases were standardized. The main motivation of the work was to create a single relational database which allows fast and simple data retrieval by in-house scientists. Second, we wanted to know the amount of overlap between databases by commercial and public vendors to see whether the former contain data complementing the latter. Third, we quantified the degree of inconsistency between data sources by comparing data points derived from the same scientific article cited by more than one vendor. We found that each data source contains unique data which is due to different scientific articles cited by the vendors. When comparing data derived from the same article we found that inconsistencies between the vendors are common. In conclusion, using databases of different vendors is still useful since the data overlap is not complete. It should be noted that this can be partially explained by the inconsistencies and errors in the source data.