January 1, 2008 (Vol. 28, No. 1)

URL:

http://kibank.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

Rating:

Strong Points: Extensive database

Weak Points: Hard to get a handle on the contents

Summary:

Aimed at the legion of people interested in designing new drugs, KiBank is a basic site focused on helping researchers towards this end. The site’s approach to the subject is by providing structures (chemicals and target proteins), binding affinity information, and a handful of selected links. With over 16,000 entries relating to binding affinity, the site has no shortage of information. The searching scheme employed allows users to find information by chemical name, by protein name, or by protein function. The last two options are interconnected and options within them can be combined to allow visitors to browse through information about proteins in various categories. Overall, I didn’t get a sense of the breadth of the site, perhaps because to do so would require many more searches than this review would allow. Perhaps the designers should consider better descriptions of the content and other options for searching the database.

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