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A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 August 2009

This article has been updated

Abstract

Between 2004 and 2008, the US National Institutes of Health Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative pilot phase funded 10 high-throughput screening centers, resulting in the deposition of 691 assays into PubChem and the nomination of 64 chemical probes. We crowdsourced the Molecular Libraries and Imaging initiative output to 11 experts, who expressed medium or high levels of confidence in 48 of these 64 probes.

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Figure 1: Heatmap of the confidence scores, by voting member, sorted by the median value.
Figure 2: Measured activity versus estimated aqueous solubility for the 64 chemical probes.
Figure 3: Ro5 descriptor space summary of the NIH chemical probes.

Change history

  • 17 June 2009

    In the version of this article initially published, the phrase "Though MLI and its pilot phase budget and superficially modest productivity were subject to industrial criticism" originally cited reference 3, but should cite reference 2. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Bolton (NIH/PubChem) for promptly answering questions related to the MLI. B.K. Shoichet (University of California, San Francisco) voted on some of these chemical probes, as reflected in Figure 1 and Supplementary Table 1. C.A. Taylor, J. Feng, R. Yang, Y. Tang, D. Kuster and C.M.W. Ho (all from Washington University School of Medicine) contributed to the probe evaluation vote of G. Marshall. J. Besnard (University of Dundee) contributed to the vote of A. Hopkins. This work was supported by NIH grant 1U54MH084690 (to the University of New Mexico).

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Correspondence to Tudor I Oprea or Larry A Sklar.

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T.O. is the founder and CEO of Sunset Molecular Discovery LLC, and co-founder of Drug4Cast LLC; both companies provide services related to the pharmaceutical sector. T.O. also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for ChemDiv, Inc. L.A.S. is a founder of IntelliCyt, a company that provides hardware and software for the HyperCyt HTS flow cytometry platform.

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Supplementary Table 1 (XLS 828 kb)

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Oprea, T., Bologa, C., Boyer, S. et al. A crowdsourcing evaluation of the NIH chemical probes. Nat Chem Biol 5, 441–447 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nchembio0709-441

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