Commentary outlines plan for crowdsourced Chemical Probes Portal

Chemical probes — small molecules that interact with a protein’s function — can be powerful tools to reveal the roles of targeted proteins in health and disease, but probes are sometimes of low quality, and high-quality ones can be misused. In a Nature Chemical Biology commentary, a multi-institutional team, including Broad Institute’s Stuart Schreiber, Nathanael Gray, and Joanne Kotz, describe plans for a new community-driven wiki-like site, called the Chemical Probes Portal, that crowdsources medicinal chemistry and pharmacology expertise to catalog the best chemical probes for a given protein target. The resource aims to support research in basic biology and the pursuit of new therapeutics.