CHEB

CHEB (Chemical Entities of Biological Interest) is a freely available dictionary of molecular entities focused on 'small' chemical compounds. The term 'molecular entity' refers to any constitutionally or isotopically distinct atom, molecule, ion, ion pair, radical, radical ion, complex, conformer, etc., identifiable as a separately distinguishable entity. CHEB is part of the Open Biomedical Ontologies effort.

Overview

CHEB is used in the annotation of genes and gene products in various databases. It provides definitions for molecular entities of interest to biochemists, chemists and molecular biologists. CHEB also includes an ontology intended to describe, classify and relate chemical entities of biological interest. It is used by major databases such as UniProt to annotate entries.

Structure

The CHEB data and ontology are structured in a way that makes them useful for much more than simply a standard for nomenclature. CHEB is built with the goal of providing a classification of molecules of biological interest in terms of their structural features and their biological role or function.

Applications

CHEB has wide applications in areas such as metabolomics, chemogenomics, and systems biology. It is also used in the annotation of pathways and in the integration of metabolic network models.

See also

• Biological database
• Chemoinformatics
• Bioinformatics
• Molecular biology
• Systems biology

External links

• Official CHEB website