Abstract
PubChem (https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov) is an open archive which contains information on small molecules as well as other chemical entities such as lipids, carbohydrates, and (chemically modified) amino acid and nucleic acid sequences (including siRNA and miRNA). Developed and maintained by the US National Institutes of Health, PubChem is a chemical information hub, collecting chemical information from various data sources and disseminating it to the public free of charge. PubChem provides multiple programmatic access routes, including E-Utilities, Power User Gateway (PUG), PUG-SOAP, and PUG-REST. This chapter describes how to access PubChem programmatically through PUG-REST. The syntax of the PUG-REST request URL is explained with many examples that cover various tasks and a series of Perl scripts are provided to demonstrate how these URLs can be included in actual programs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
References
Kim S, Thiessen PA, Bolton EE, Chen J, Fu G, Gindulyte A, Han L, He J, He S, Shoemaker BA, Wang J, Yu B, Zhang J, Bryant SH (2016) PubChem substance and compound databases. Nucleic Acids Res 44(D1):D1202–D1213. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkv951
Wang YL, Suzek T, Zhang J, Wang JY, He SQ, Cheng TJ, Shoemaker BA, Gindulyte A, Bryant SH (2014) PubChem BioAssay: 2014 update. Nucleic Acids Res 42(D1):D1075–D1082. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkt978
Kim S (2016) Getting the most out of PubChem for virtual screening. Expert Opin Drug Discov 11(9):843–855. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460441.2016.1216967
Kim S, Thiessen PA, Bolton EE, Bryant SH (2015) PUG-SOAP and PUG-REST: web services for programmatic access to chemical information in PubChem. Nucleic Acids Res 43(W1):W605–W611. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkv396
Kim S, Thiessen PA, Cheng T, Yu B, Bolton EE (2018) An update on PUG-REST: RESTful interface for programmatic access to PubChem. Nucleic Acids Res 46(W1):W563–W570. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gky294
Programmatic Access to PubChem. https://pubchemdocs.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/programmatic-access
Entrez programming utilities help. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK25501
Entrez Help (2005) National Center for Biotechnology Information. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3836/. Accessed 9 Nov 2015
SOAP Specifications. http://www.w3.org/TR/soap/
Fielding RT (2000) Representational state transfer (REST). In: Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures. University of California, Irvine
Fielding RT, Taylor RN (2000) Principled design of the modern Web architecture. Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on software engineering. pp 407–416. https://doi.org/10.1145/337180.337228
A PUG-REST Tutorial. https://pubchemdocs.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pug-rest-tutorial
Bolton EE, Chen J, Kim S, Han L, He S, Shi W, Simonyan V, Sun Y, Thiessen PA, Wang J, Yu B, Zhang J, Bryant SH (2011) PubChem3D: a new resource for scientists. J Cheminform 3(1):32. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-32
Bolton EE, Kim S, Bryant SH (2011) PubChem3D: conformer generation. J Cheminform 3(1):4. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-4
Kim S, Bolton EE, Bryant SH (2013) PubChem3D: conformer ensemble accuracy. J Cheminform 5(1):1. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-5-1
PubChem Structure Download Service. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pc_fetch/pc_fetch.cgi
PubChem Assay Download Service. https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/assay/assaydownload.cgi
PubChem FTP Site. ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubchem/
Medical Subject Headings. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/mesh
Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Classification System. http://www.who.int/classifications/atcddd/en/
International Patent Classification (IPC). http://www.wipo.int/classifications/ipc/en/
PubChem substructure fingerprint description. ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubchem/specifications/pubchem_fingerprints.pdf
Holliday JD, Hu CY, Willett P (2002) Grouping of coefficients for the calculation of inter-molecular similarity and dissimilarity using 2D fragment bit-strings. Comb Chem High Throughput Screen 5(2):155–166
Holliday JD, Salim N, Whittle M, Willett P (2003) Analysis and display of the size dependence of chemical similarity coefficients. J Chem Inf Comput Sci 43(3):819–828. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci034001x
Chen X, Reynolds CH (2002) Performance of similarity measures in 2D fragment-based similarity searching: comparison of structural descriptors and similarity coefficients. J Chem Inf Comput Sci 42(6):1407–1414. https://doi.org/10.1021/ci025531g
ROCS—Rapid Overlay of Chemical Structures (2011) 3.1.1 ed. OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc., Santa Fe, NM
Bolton EE, Kim S, Bryant SH (2011) PubChem3D: similar conformers. J Cheminform 3(1):13. https://doi.org/10.1186/1758-2946-3-13
Grant JA, Gallardo MA, Pickup BT (1996) A fast method of molecular shape comparison: a simple application of a Gaussian description of molecular shape. J Comput Chem 17(14):1653–1666
LWP::Simple—simple procedural interface to LWP. https://metacpan.org/pod/distribution/libwww-perl/lib/LWP/Simple.pm
LWP::UserAgent—Web user agent class. https://metacpan.org/pod/release/ETHER/libwww-perl-6.15/lib/LWP/UserAgent.pm
HTTP::Request—HTTP style request message. https://metacpan.org/pod/release/ETHER/HTTP-Message-6.11/lib/HTTP/Request.pm
HTTP::Request::Common—Construct common HTTP::Request objects. https://metacpan.org/pod/release/ETHER/HTTP-Message-6.11/lib/HTTP/Request/Common.pm
Acknowledgments
This research was supported in part by the Intramural Research Program of the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, the US Department of Health and Human Services.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature
About this protocol
Cite this protocol
Kim, S., Thiessen, P.A., Bolton, E.E. (2018). Programmatic Retrieval of Small Molecule Information from PubChem Using PUG-REST. In: Methods in Pharmacology and Toxicology. Humana Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/7653_2018_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/7653_2018_30
Published:
Publisher Name: Humana Press