Utilizing Online Databases for the Purpose of Structure Identification – Approaches Utilizing the ChemSpider Resource

As scientists we now have online a number of domain specific databases in chemistry for us to use. While there are hundreds of these “compound databases” available for us to access there are very few developed with the concerns of the analytical scientist in mind. ChemSpider is a free resource from the Royal Society of Chemistry hosting over 28 million chemicals from over 400 data sources and is already utilized by the mass spectrometry community in particular to aid in the process of structure verification. This presentation will give an overview of how ChemSpider has become one of the internets’ primary resources for chemists providing access to chemicals, experimental and predicted properties, patents, publications and analytical data and ultimately acting as a structure-centric hub. The importance of programming interfaces to allow for integration and how the primary mass spectrometry vendors are already utilizing ChemSpider will be discussed. The progress towards providing a dereplication platform for natural products using a combination of mass spectrometry and NMR spectroscopy data will be outlined and the path forward to a fully chemical structure-enabled internet and the importance of data interchange standards to enable this will be discussed.