Technological development in the last three decades considerably increased the level and extent of scientific information that can be freely accessed by the general public. One of the major developments in this respect is open professional scientific databases that promote easy and affordable access to extensive information. In chemistry, such databases provide various search strategies to retrieve information about specific molecules based on their names, chemical formulas, molecular properties, structural drawing or similar sub-structures. In addition, more sophisticated searches are possible based on combinations of properties or by searching several databases at once, all of which were beyond reach to many chemical researchers as well as educators before the current era. This remarkably massive progress owes its success to significant technological advancements in the field of cheminformatics, and specifically to the development of special codes to store, draw, retrieve, and visualize chemical data online. Integrating pieces of information about molecules and their properties into families of compounds, and making contextual connections between them, stand in the heart of chemistry education. In this respect, proper use of chemical databases can significantly enhance these learning processes. In light of the variety of available databases and their pedagogical potential, we argue that big data in chemistry has evolved to the point where chemistry educators should become familiar with molecular databases, learn how to work with them, and develop strategies to transfer this knowledge to their students by modifying the curricula of chemistry programs. Several pedagogical strategies to employ chemistry databases in the chemistry classroom will be presented and exemplified along with popular molecular databases such as PubChem, ChemSpider, The Protein Data Bank, WebElements, The Cambridge Structural Database and others.

Integrating molecular databases in the chemistry curriculum

ACS Spring Meeting 2021

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