| Resumo: |
Chemical biology approach enables us to understand the complex biological systems, using small molecules such as a specific activator or inhibitor of protein, a hormone-like inducer, or a neurotransmitter. When such approach is performed genome-widely, that research is especially called "chemical genomics". We are planning to make a new start of chemical genomics using one of chordate model animal, ascidian. As a first step, we constructed a database called ACBD (Ascidians Chemical Biology Database). 

 First, we reviewed and annotated past articles which describe the uses of small chemicals in the field of ascidians biology. In ACBD, chemical information and effects on ascidian are manually extracted from more than 900 articles in PubMed database from 1964 to 2010. ACBD is free and open to the public on the web. ACBD has two main parts. One part consists of information about already-used chemicals to ascidians. This part is based on the record of already-published articles. In this part, we realized that more than 351 kinds of chemicals were applied for ascidian and that more than 399 kinds of chemicals were isolated from 120 kinds of tunicates!

 The other part consists of “not-yet-used chemicals” information. Although the total number of Ciona protein model (KH model, Satou et al., 2008) is said to be 24,025, only 199 kinds of KH models have ever modified by chemical compounds. To know the number of potentially modifiable target proteins by currently available chemicals, we searched KH model against amino acid sequences of drug targets of chemicals recorded in DrugBank (Wishart DS et al., 2008). As a result, we found that 1,862 KH Ciona models might be modifiable by using commercially available chemicals. Thus, we can say that 7.8% of Ciona models have a potential to be modified their functions by chemicals. These information in ACBD are useful for researchers interested in drug screening as well as chemical genomics. In near future, we are planning to integrate ACBD into CIPRO and ANISEED.
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