Goal
BioSpider aims to improve the current state of knowledge regarding various drugs, chemicals, metabolites, proteins, and targets available in public databases. The internet is full of information on such molecules, however this information is scattered amongst umpteen databases. BioSpider aims to capture this information by scanning and scraping data from various open websites (with credit given where necessary).
Applications
Pharmaceutical Research: Those in the pharmaceutical field will find BioSpider useful as it not only obtains chemical properties for a given drug, but predicts drug targets by examining the category and likeness to other drugs. Once a target has been predicted, BioSpider will go out and capture information about that target, enabling quick validation and retrieval of relevant information without the need to visit another source.
Chemical Research: Those in the chemistry field will find BioSpider useful simply as a chemical/physical property search engine. As a chemist must often visit various sources in order to obtain information such as melting point, solubility, and chemical structure, it is convenient to bring that information together in one place.
Simplicity
In addition to its usefulness, BioSpider provides several types of query ranging from CAS number to Swissprot ID.
These different types of query are also simplified into a single, novel, smart search field able
to guess the type of query and alter the results accordingly (for example, a search for a metabolite should
not return information on mechanism of action).
However, often a simple search is not enough. Therefore the advanced query permits a broad range of
search parameter specifications. From deciding on inputs
to deciding the type of output, the advanced search provides an excellent
degree of customizability and power.
Experience
BioSpider was developed to fill a need. During the curation of two database projects,
DrugBank and the
Human Metabolome Database, it was discovered by the research team that
the information available on drugs and metabolites was abundant, yet scattered and often inaccessible.
Thus BioSpider was created in order to aid in the human-curation of both database projects. Researchers,
given a list of drugs or metabolites, could obtain a wealth of information about each molecule on the
list, providing an automatic - yet easy to validate - curation method.
It was by filling this need that BioSpider matured and adapted to the needs of the researcher.
Indeed, as BioSpider fulfills the needs of other projects, it is bound to grow in scope and usefulness.
Publication Details
BioSpider: A Web Server for Automating Metabolome Annotations. Pacific Symp. Biocomp. 2007, eds. Altmann R et al.