HSLS Update

ChemIDplus: Lite and Advanced Chemical Searching

ChemIDplus <http://chem.sis.nlm.nih.gov/chemidplus/> is a free database produced by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Division of Specialized Information Services (SIS). It contains over 368,000 chemical records, more than half of which include chemical structures. The Databases, available since 2000, was recently upgraded to enable searching with additional chemical and biological properties through two interfaces - ChemIDplus Lite or ChemIDplus Advanced.

ChemIDplus Lite can be used to search chemical names and registry numbers. The results are provided as a list of databases containing information on the desired substance, such as RTECS (Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances) or EMIC (Environmental Mutagen Information Center), among others, as well as a list of corresponding PubMed citations.

More complex searching is available through ChemIDplus Advanced. In addition to displaying the same results (list of databases) produced in a Lite search, the Advanced version retrieves 2D and 3D depictions of chemical structures, and much more. Advanced features allows in-depth searching for:

• Substance identification
• Toxicity (LD, LD50, LC, LC50, TDLo, and TCLo values)
• Chemical properties (melting/boiling points, water solubility, log P, Henry’s Law Constant, etc.)
• Locator codes (limit to specific NLM databases/resources)
• Molecular weight (<, >, etc.)
• Structure (e.g. substructure, similarity, or exact structure search). Plug-ins, readily available for download, are required for structure searching.

Detailed explanations and search examples for using ChemIDplus are available by clicking the on-screen Help button or the "i" (information) buttons.

--Linda Hartman