The promise and peril of chemical probes.

The article presents the authors' argument on the need for a complementary approach for an open community resource about the quality of new chemical probes or to reduce the use of low-quality chemical probes. They provide definition of a chemical probe and highlight soma examples of high quality chemical probes and probes of lesser value. They also describe plans of creating a web-based resource comprising of the most appropriate chemical probe for a given protein target.