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Open Position: Computational Biologist / Bioinformatician

We are looking for a highly motivated Computational Biologist / Bioinformatician (*) to join the Chemical Biology Resources team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), located on the Wellcome Genome Campus near Cambridge, as part of the Wellcome Trust funded LIGMAP project, a multi-disciplinary collaboration between University College London and EMBL-EBI. LIGMAP is an ambitious multiyear project, led by University College London, to identify the endogenous ligands of the many proteins of unknown function in the proteome using AI-based methods as well as classical machine learning. You will work closely with the PDBe team at EMBL-EBI, as well as leading researchers in structural biology and machine learning at University College London, to deliver the goals of the project. You will develop descriptors to characterise the binding site of proteins in terms of their ability to recognise ligands, and use these to assess druggability of protein binding sites.   This positi...
Recent posts

ChEMBL 37 is here: bigger, cleaner, and smarter about protein degradation

ChEMBL 37 arrives with nearly three million compounds, a new modality field for capturing targeted protein degraders, and a wave of data quality improvements.    A new field for targeted protein degradation Around 29,000 bioactivity data points have been annotated with     ACTIVITIES.MODALITY  = “Targeted Protein Degradation” , including around 3,000 legacy bioactivities from approximately 1,200 remapped assays. This marks ChEMBL’s first systematic effort to flag TPD data across the database.        Extensive update of literature data Scientific literature remains the backbone of ChEMBL, and ChEMBL 37 brings one of the more substantial literature updates in recent releases. Compared to ChEMBL 36, the literature source gained approximately 79,000 new assays, 270,000 new bioactivity data points, and 52,000 new compound records — pushing the total literature-derived activity count past 9.55 million. Twelve new c...

The first PROTAC has been approved: can we find it in ChEMBL?

  ChEMBL extracts data from the core medicinal chemistry literature and therefore reflects ongoing developments in drug discovery. One area currently attracting high interest is targeted protein degradation: compounds that direct disease-causing proteins to the cell’s degradation machinery.  These modalities are both present and rapidly increasing within ChEMBL, providing an important data source for the community.   Targeted Protein Degradation Data in ChEMBL However, new and emerging modalities bring new challenges. Data should be well structured and FAIR, but for newer modalities, controlled vocabularies may not exist or adequately cover the breadth of data being reported. Cu ration effort in this area supports our broader goals towards generating bespoke datasets and improving AI-readiness.  W e recently had the opportunity to attend the first ISCB UK conference where we presented our work towards the capture and annotatio...

Help Shape the Future of ChEMBL: Take Our User Survey Now!

  Dear ChEMBL and SureChEMBL Community, As you know we are dedicated to keeping ChEMBL and SureChEMBL world-class resources for the scientific community, but to do that effectively, we need to hear from you.  To ensure we are consistently meeting your research needs, we are excited to launch our latest ChEMBL User Survey . Why Your Feedback Matters As we plan the next phases and future developments for our platforms, this survey is your opportunity to have a direct impact. By sharing how you interact with our data, you help us understand what works, what doesn't, and what you need next. Your insights will allow us to: Refine the interface: Make navigating and extracting data smoother and more intuitive. Prioritize new features: Focus our development efforts on the tools that will best support your drug discovery and research processes. Evolve with you: Ensure that ChEMBL and SureChEMBL stay in sync with the...

ChEMBL UGM: Speakers confirmed

I'm very excited. We now have a list of confirmed speakers for the upcoming ChEMBL UGM (June 10-11). Uday Abu-Shehab, University of Vienna Katie Beckwith, Ignota Labs Evan Bolton, PubChem Giovanni Cincilla, Healx Wei Dai, Queen Mary University of London Wim Dehaen, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague Luca Falciola, SCIBILIS Thierry Hanser, Ixelis Tobias Harren, Universität Hamburg Greg Landrum, ETH Zurich John Mayfield, NextMove Software John Overington, DrugHunter Carl Schiebroek, ETH Zurich Chris Southan, University of Edinburgh Brandon Walts, SciBite I think it's going to be a really exciting line-up covering a diverse range of topics.  If you still haven't signed up , note that the closing date for in-person registration is 18th May. Note also that we have a limit in numbers for Day Two, and it's first come, first served.

OPSIN v2.9.0 released

Just a quick note to say that Daniel Lowe has released OPSIN v.2.9.0 , the first release since Oct 2023. This is now available via the EMBL-EBI OPSIN server . The release notes describe a mixture of minor bug fixes and improvements: Support for IUPAC recommended primed number-letter locants e.g. 2''a Command-line output now includes warnings e.g. ambiguity SMILES writer now starts from a * atom if one is present Added numbering to nicotine Correctly interpretation of locanted perhalo terms and perhaloalkylalkanes Improved additive bond formation for phosphoryl Corrected locants on tolyl and assume p-tolyl if unspecified triazine is now interpreted as 1,3,5-triazine if unspecified Corrected interpretation of dithiazolium Fixed rare SMILES writing bug where slashes could be inconsistent Fixed ylidenethenylidene being parsed as [ylidene][thenylidene] instead of [yliden][ethenylidene] Fixed bug in spiro superscript inferring when a bridge is length 0