---
title: "Databases overview"
description: "Search ChEMBL bioactivity, PubChem, ZINC, UniProt, PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov — the fastest first step before you run a model."
tags:
  - section
  - databases
generated: true
---

Most questions start by looking something up: a bioactive compound, a purchasable analog, a protein annotation, a paper. This section searches curated chemical, biological, clinical, and literature databases — the fastest, cheapest first step before you run a model. You run a lookup by asking Ivy in chat; there is no job to track and no form to fill in.

> **Availability**

> These tools are metered by credits and gated by your plan — plans set your monthly credits, available model families, and which modal-app tools you can run. See [Plans & tiers](/docs/plans-and-tiers).

## What you can achieve here

- Find bioactive compounds on a target
- Find purchasable / in-stock compounds
- Look up protein sequences and annotations
- Search literature and clinical trials

For which tool fits each, see [What you can achieve](/docs/capabilities).

## Tools in this section

| Tool | What it does |
|---|---|
| [ChEMBL on the platform](/docs/chembl) | Search Europe's largest open bioactivity database for compounds, targets, and assay data. |
| [PubChem search](/docs/pubchem) | Look up PubChem by CID, name or structure, pull properties, run Tanimoto similarity and substructure queries, and export CSV or SDF inside PUG REST… |
| [PubMed Search on the platform](/docs/pubmed) | Search PubMed/MEDLINE for biomedical literature using natural language or Boolean queries. |
| [UniProt Search on the platform](/docs/uniprot) | Search the UniProt protein database for sequences, annotations, GO terms, and cross-references. |
| [ZINC Database](/docs/zinc) | Query, filter, and download ZINC compounds through the platform workflows. |
| [Clinical Trials Search on the platform](/docs/clinical-trials) | Search ClinicalTrials.gov for active and completed trials by condition, intervention, phase, and status. |

## Recipes using these tools

## Read next