The results are in – inorganics are out!
From the ChEMBL-og blog which “covers the activities of the Computational Chemical Biology Group at the EMBL-EBI in Hinxton.
From the post:
A few weeks ago we ran a small poll on how we should deal with inorganic molecules – not just simple sodium salts, but things like organoplatinums, and other compounds with dative bonds, unusual electronic states, etc. The results from you were clear, there was little interest in having a lot of our curation time spent on these. We will continue to collect structures from the source journals, and they will be in the full database, but we won’t try and curate the structures, or display them in the interface. They will be appropriately flagged, and nothing will get lost. So there it is, democracy in action.
So for ChEMBL 16 expect fewer issues when you try and load our structures in your own pipelines and systems.
Just an FYI that inorganic compounds are not being curated at ChEMBL.
If you decide to undertake such work, contacting ChEMBL to coordinate collection, etc., would be a good first step.