A Public Cannabinoid Molecular Information Repository

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Cannabinoids (CB), a class of GPCR-targeted molecules, represent an important family of molecules with large diversity. Their uses are not limited to studying drug abuse but also to designing new drugs for cancer chemotherapy, AIDS, pain relief, muscle spasms, glaucoma, immune suppression, etc. Scientists have synthesized and bio-examined many structurally similar or dissimilar cannabimimetic ligands. Thousands of journal articles have been published regarding CB research and clinical trials. The cannabinoid community is forming its own genre of new scientific research. Unfortunately, due to the traditional method of publicizing research works in paper form, the data related to CB ligands are scattered in archival journals. This makes it very difficult to find, associate and validate reported molecules and reuse the reported research results for further studies. This problem is expected to be much more aggravating in the future as number of the scientists studying the molecules increases many-fold and the size of CB applications grows exponentially. The goal of this proposal is to develop a public repository that includes a majority of published data about cannabinoids in a structured, electronic format. By having such a database, scientists will be able to easily query and retrieve their needed ligand information and, furthermore, associate them with other related data available in public or private repositories. Our goal is not only to create the repository by collecting existing data and integrating them but also to design and implement a computational environment that facilitates the repository's future growth. In the long run, the researchers of the cannabinoid community should deposit the data by themselves and maintain the database in a collective community effort. Our goal also includes developing flexible, easy to use query interfaces for the database that are crucial to encouraging community scientists to adopt the repository for their daily study. In addition, we plan to incorporate the newest data exchange technology, XML, into the database so that the content of this database becomes more portable to third party computational environments and becomes more immune to future changes in database technology, as well. Ultimately, this proposed research project will make a significant contribution by developing a tool and a medium for information exchange and data sharing among the scientific community and beyond.