PubChem

In the bioinformatics course (BPS114), I get to revisit the NCBI website introduced to me by my bio professor at Pasadena City College. He made us do a genetics project using BLAST, a database within the NCBI website that allows you to search for homologs using a gene sequence. At the time, I hated having to complete the project and was happy to get it over with. Little did I know that I would be doing a lot more genetic research using the same website here at UCSF. It really amazes me how many genes we have sequenced and mapped but I'm really glad that I'm not involved with those projects. They seem so tedious! We even have complete a group project that's worth 30% of our lab grade using those gene databases! I'm so not looking forward to doing it. It's a good thing that we at least got to pick our team members.

Well, I'm studying for the second midterm in this class and not much is getting into my head. I keep on wanting to practice multi-step metabolic reactions for pharmaceutical chemistry instead. However, I managed to find something interesting from studying BPS 114 today: the PubChem database from NCBI! It's really a cool website where we can type in the names of drugs and find structural, chemical and other information for them. It also has a link to PubMed articles using the MeSH tree (a controlled vocabulary to help us refine search) as a search strategy. Through PubChem, I found a link to DailyMed, an NIH website with free information on all FDA-approved drugs. I think that site will become my good friends throughout my years here at UCSF and career as a pharmacist.