A new report urges biomedical researchers to use online web resources very carefully, taking into account their complementary benefits and weaknesses, when selecting small-molecule chemical probes to help answer their research questions.
In a ‘special report’ published today (Thursday) in the journal Future Medicinal Chemistry today, scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, carried out the first comprehensive assessment of all the publicly available resources on chemical probes.
The report strongly recommends that researchers should avoid general search engines and vendor catalogue information and instead use two kinds of online resource – expert reviews and computational Big Data approaches – in order to make the best decisions about which chemical probes to use in biomedical research, and also to avoid poor selection of tools that can lead to incorrect conclusions.
Read more at Institute of Cancer Research