Know Your NLM Resources: PubChem

Posted by Sarah Levin-Lederer on October 16th, 2022 Posted in: Blog, NLM Resources
Tags: National Library of Medicine, NLM, open science, PubChem

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Most partners who know us are familiar with NLM resources like PubMed and MedlinePlus. Some are familiar with other resources like ClinicalTrails. But do you know about PubChem?

What is PubChem?

From the website:

“PubChem is the world’s largest collection of freely accessible chemical information. Search chemicals by name, molecular formula, structure, and other identifiers. Find chemical and physical properties, biological activities, safety and toxicity information, patents, literature citations and more.”

PubChem is a great resource for scientists, teachers, students and the general public.

What can you find on PubChem?

When you search PubChem you get results for:

• Substances such as chemical structures, synonyms, IDs, descriptions and more. Substance summaries include information about who provided what.
• Compounds: Aggregated information about chemicals that have the same structure
• BioAssays: Information on biological assay experiments and bioactivity test results
• Genes and Proteins records include chemical information including bioactivity data.
• Pathways: Information about chemicals, genes or diseases involved in or associated with a biological pathway. For example, pathways involved in metabolism.
• Taxonomy: Data associated with specific organism
• Patents: Information on what chemicals are mentioned in a patent document.

How can you use PubChem?

You can search PubChem by name (generic or brand name), chemical compound, CAS number and more.

Results are linked internally between the different result categories and externally to things like their corresponding PubMed MeSH terms.

Try searching Tylenol and Acetaminophen to see how the results compare.

Learn more about searching and using PubChem with the new PubChem tutorial released this summer.

And if you use ChemIDplus or The Drug Information Portal, be aware that this information is moving to PubChem in December, 2022.