ZINC database

The ZINC database is a curated collection of commercially available chemical compounds prepared especially for virtual screening. ZINC is used by investigators in pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and research universities.

WWW Official Site

Scope and access

ZINC is different from other chemical databases because it aims to represent the biologically relevant, three dimensional form of the molecule.

Curation and updates

ZINC is updated regularly and may be downloaded and used free of charge. It is developed by John Irwin in the Shoichet Laboratory in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Version

The latest release of the website interface is "ZINC-22". The database is continuously updated and as of 2023 is claimed to contain over 37 billion commercially available molecules.

Uses

The database is typically used for molecule mining, a process in which Quantitative structure–activity relationships are used to find new compounds with improved biological activity, given a known starting point found, for example, by high-throughput screening.