The ZINC database (recursive acronym: ZINC is not commercial) is a curated collection of commercially available chemical compounds prepared especially for virtual screening. ZINC is used by investigators (generally people with training as biologists or chemists) in pharmaceutical companies, biotechnology companies, and research universities.

Scope and access

ZINC is different from other chemical databases because it aims to represent the biologically relevant, three dimensional form of the molecule.

Curation and updates

ZINC is updated regularly and may be downloaded and used free of charge. It is developed by John Irwin in the Shoichet Laboratory in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

Version

The latest release of the website interface is "ZINC-22". The database is continuously updated and is claimed to contain over 37 billion commercially available molecules.

Uses

The database is typically used for molecule mining, a process in which Quantitative structure–activity relationships are used to find new compounds with improved biological activity, given a known starting point found, for example, by high-throughput screening.