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Are ions and molecules mutually exclusive? #4888

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@sfluegel05

Hi,

I have a question about how the molecule (CHEBI:25367) and ion (CHEBI:24870) classes work. The definitions say that a molecule is

Any polyatomic entity that is an electrically neutral entity consisting of more than one atom.

and an ion is

A molecular entity having a net electric charge.

This implies to me that these classes are disjoint - a molecular entity can be either neutral or charged, but not both. However, this does not reflect the current practice in ChEBI. I found 2,257 classes that subclasses of both ion and molecule. Am I missing something here?

Here are some examples of larger classes in ChEBI that have both superclasses:

chebi_id name number of subclasses
64482 phosphatidylcholine 1100
63048 1,3-thiazolium cation 31
57875 2-acyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine 35
57880 1-phosphatidyl-1D-myo-inositol(1-) 75
47811 penamcarboxylate 33
64583 sphingomyelin 322
58168 1-O-acyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine 74
36702 2-acyl-1-alkyl-sn-glycero-3-phosphocholine 66
190712 epoxy monocarboxylic acid anion 49

@amalik01 I believe we already had an exchange via mail about phosphocholines where you suggesting separating the class into a neutral phosphocholines and a charged phosphocholines(1+). This would probably solve this for the majority of classes. Maybe one can do something similar for the other classes as well?

I have attached a full list of molecule-ion classes in ChEBI (not including classes that have superclasses that also fall into the intersection).

molecule_ion_overlap.csv

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