Chemical probes are powerful reagents with increasing impacts on biomedical research. However, probes of poor quality or that are used incorrectly generate misleading results. To help address these shortcomings, we will create a community-driven wiki resource to improve quality and convey current best practice.

Pan-Assay Interference Compounds (PAINS) are very familiar to medicinal chemists who have spent time fruitlessly trying to optimize these non-progressable compounds. Electronic filters formulated to recognize PAINS can process hundreds and thousands of compounds in seconds and are in widespread current use to identify PAINS in order to exclude them from further analysis. However, this practice is fraught with danger because such black box treatment is simplistic. Here we outline for the first time all necessary considerations for the appropriate use of PAINs filters