A team of current and former members of the Hargrove group led by Dr. Brittany Morgan and Bilva Sanaba has recently updated the RNA-targeted Bioactive Ligand Database (R-BIND) and made the database available in a user-friendly website platform! The R-BIND update showed that there were little to no changes in the physicochemical and spatial properties of RNA-targeted ligands despite an almost 50% increase in database size, further supporting the notion of a privileged chemical space for RNA-binding small molecules. The community can now access all this information and a suite of tools for probe development at rbind.chem.duke.edu. The Hargrove lab envisions that this platform will serve as a valuable resource for chemical probes and control experiments, and its various search options as well as a nearest neighbor algorithm can be used for designing and optimizing small molecule libraries or lead molecules, ultimately expediting the discovery of chemical probes for RNA. Read more about the database update and website development in the latest issue of ACS Chemical Biology, available here.
Chemistry
