Overview

This FAQ document is complementary to the practical use-orientated Help documentation and the About page. This focuses more on the "how, why and wherefore" of our database content.

General Questions

  • Is there a recent overview?
  • What are the current content statistics?
  • What is the update frequency?
  • How can I cite the resource?
  • Do you have an official abbreviation?
  • What are the origins of the resource?
  • What is the difference between the database and the affiliated review articles?
  • Are there links from published articles out to the database?
  • What about the original IUPHAR-DB website?
  • How is this resource supported?
  • What about downloading and consuming?

Data Questions

  • Is there a difference between old and new data content?
  • What sources do you use for curation?
  • How do you choose which papers to curate and what activity types to extract?
  • Do you only extract from papers?
  • For which entries do you reference patents?
  • What about log transformations and value rounding?
  • Does the population of the database involve tacit judgements?
  • Do you include large-scale matrix data?
  • Can we alert you to papers for abstraction into the database?
  • What about annotation re-cycling?

Target Questions

  • What does "target" mean in the database context?
  • What is the difference between "summary" and "detailed" pages for targets?
  • What proteins do you include and why?
  • What identifiers are used for targets?
  • Which proteins are cross-referenced in UniProt?
  • What about protein target complexes?
  • What about splice variants?
  • What about transport, metabolism and molecular toxicology?
  • Do you include proteins without ligand interactions?
  • Do you only annotate ligands against human proteins?
  • Will you be curating all possible drug targets?
  • What does the primary target icon mean?

Ligand Questions

  • What does "ligand" mean in the database context?
  • What identifiers are used for ligands?
  • How do you generate the ligand images?
  • How can I find ligand similarity relationships?
  • What approved drugs are included and how do you know they are correct?
  • Will you be curating all approved drugs?
  • What about polypharmacology?
  • What about ligands with pharmacological effects of unknown mechanism?
  • What about hybrid therapeutic modalities?
  • What type of rule-bending do you accommodate?
  • Why include separate radioactive ligand records?
  • What about chemical suppliers?
  • Why are keyword search "call-outs" useful?