compoundassociated

Compoundassociated is a term used in cheminformatics to describe a recorded link between a chemical compound and another entity, such as a biological target, a disease, or a metabolic pathway. It serves as a generic label within data schemas and graph representations to capture the existence of a relationship involving a compound.

In practice, a compoundassociated entry comprises fields such as compound_id, associated_entity_id, association_type, evidence, and source, with an optional confidence score. The association_type may denote categories like target interaction, pharmacological effect, metabolic transformation, or literature mention. Relationships can be directional, indicating that a compound is related to an entity, or bidirectional when the relationship is mutual.

Applications span drug discovery, toxicology assessment, pharmacology research, and literature mining. Aggregating many compoundassociated links allows researchers to construct interaction networks that reveal polypharmacology, potential off-target effects, or enrichment of particular biological pathways. These networks support hypothesis generation and prioritization in experimental planning.

Etymology and standards: the term is a concatenation of 'compound' and 'associated' and is used informally across databases and ontologies. Because there is no single universal representation, implementations may vary in data model, terminology, and scoring conventions, requiring normalization when integrating resources from multiple sources.

See also: Compound; Target (biology); Pathway; Cheminformatics; Ontology.