John J. Irwin and Brian K. Shoichet laboratory, Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, UCSF
identifier format
ZINC<alphanumeric ID> (e.g., ZINC000000000053)
license
Free public access and bulk download for academic and commercial researchers ("ZINC Is Not Commercial")
introduced
2005
Core Principles & Analysis
Developed by John Irwin and Brian Shoichet at the University of California, San Francisco (with the recursive acronym "ZINC Is Not Commercial"), ZINC provides ready-to-dock 3D structures with assigned protonation states, tautomers, and partial charges.
By the ZINC-22 release, the database expanded from hundreds of thousands of in-stock catalog compounds to over 37 billion make-on-demand enumerated molecules from commercial chemical vendors.
Investigators filter ZINC subsets by lead-like or drug-like properties (molecular weight, calculated LogP, rotatable bonds) to run ultra-large structure-based virtual screens against GPCRs, enzymes, and ion channels.