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Czech-OPENSCREEN develops Probes and Drugs Portal

Identifying chemical probes that meet all the demands of an experimental design is not a trivial task. Information on candidates are typically scattered over various sources and its gathering can be very time consuming. Even worse in many cases, probe annotations may be already out of date, containing long disproven characteristics leading to their questionable suitability.

To simplify the task of identifying high quality chemical tools, the team of scientists at CZ-OPENSCREEN and Institute of Molecular Genetics in Prague led by Petr Bartunek (Director of the National Infrastructure for Chemical Biology) developed the Probes & Drugs (P&D) portal (https://www.probes-drugs.org). P&D portal is a powerful tool for the exploration of bioactive compound space with high attention given to compounds labeled as probes and drugs. It serves as a central hub in chemical biology research offering an intuitive, yet powerful filtering system enhanced by Boolean logic, various visualization tools and an advanced chemical intelligence supported by the integration of several chemical and biological ontologies. Through the combination of these tools, the P&D portal enables to interactively explore the bioactive compound space in a way not achievable before.