RXNO Ontology


The RXNO Ontology is a formal ontology of chemical named reactions.
It was originally developed at the Royal Society of Chemistry and is associated with the Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry. The RXNO ontology unifies several previous attempts to systematize chemical reactions including the Merck Index and the hierarchy of Carey, Laffan, Thomson and Williams.

Major Reaction Categories

The twelve top-level reaction categories proposed by Carey, Laffan, Thompson and Williams are given in the table below, together with their RXNO ontology identifiers and the equivalent wikipedia categories where applicable.
IndexReaction CategoryRXNO IDWikipedia Category
1Heteroatom alkylation and arylation:Category:Carbon-heteroatom bond forming reactions
2Acylation and related processes
3Carbon-Carbon bond formationRXNO:0000002:Category:Carbon-carbon bond forming reactions
4Heterocycle forming reactionsRXNO:0000349:Category:Heterocycle forming reactions
5Protection reactionsRXNO:0000078
6Deprotection reactionsRXNO:0000203
7Reductions:Category:Organic reduction reactions
8Oxidations:Category:Organic oxidation reactions
9Functional group interconversion RXNO:0000011:Category:Substitution reactions
10Functional group addition
11Resolution reactions
12Miscellaneous:Category:Organic reactions

Name Reactions

The following table lists the RXNO identifiers for some example name reactions.