Chemical databases for environmental health and clinical research

The increasing number of publicly available biological databases reflects the evolving need for managing and evaluating abundant and complex data in biological, clinical and computational research. Currently there are over 1000 biologically relevant databases in the public domain with varied content and diverse approaches to capturing and presenting data. This review summarizes the comparatively small niche of sophisticated databases and other resources that aim to enhance understanding of chemicals and their biological actions. The databases reviewed include 1 that emphasizes environmental chemicals and 9 that emphasize drugs and small molecules. These databases and their associated resources are incrementally strengthening the expanding field of toxicogenomics-based research by providing centralized sources of manually and computationally curated datasets and highly sophisticated tools for the meta-analysis of continually increasing environmental chemical, drug and small-molecule datasets.