Cheminformatics refers to the use of physical chemistry theory with computer and information science techniques—so called "in silico" techniques—in application to a range of descriptive and prescriptive problems in the field of chemistry, including in its applications to biology and related molecular fields. Such in silico techniques are used, for example, by pharmaceutical companies and in academic settings to aid and inform the process of drug discovery, for instance in the design of well-defined combinatorial libraries of synthetic compounds, or to assist in structure-based drug design. The methods can also be used in chemical and allied industries, and such fields as environmental science and pharmacology, where chemical processes are involved or studied.
Chemical Markup Language is an approach to managing molecular information using tools such as XML and Java. It was the first domain specific implementation based strictly on XML, first based on a DTD and later on an XML Schema, the most robust and widely used system for precise information management in many areas. It has been developed over more than a decade by Murray-Rust, Rzepa and others and has been tested in many areas and on a variety of machines.
Quantitative structure–activity relationship models are regression or classification models used in the chemical and biological sciences and engineering. Like other regression models, QSAR regression models relate a set of "predictor" variables (X) to the potency of the response variable (Y), while classification QSAR models relate the predictor variables to a categorical value of the response variable.
A molecule editor is a computer program for creating and modifying representations of chemical structures.
A chemical file format is a type of data file which is used specifically for depicting molecular data. One of the most widely used is the chemical table file format, which is similar to Structure Data Format (SDF) files. They are text files that represent multiple chemical structure records and associated data fields. The XYZ file format is a simple format that usually gives the number of atoms in the first line, a comment on the second, followed by a number of lines with atomic symbols and cartesian coordinates. The Protein Data Bank Format is commonly used for proteins but is also used for other types of molecules. There are many other types which are detailed below. Various software systems are available to convert from one format to another.
Chemical table file is a family of text-based chemical file formats that describe molecules and chemical reactions. One format, for example, lists each atom in a molecule, the x-y-z coordinates of that atom, and the bonds among the atoms.
Ghemical is a computational chemistry software package written in C++ and released under the GNU General Public License. The program has graphical user interface based on GTK+2 and supports quantum mechanical and molecular mechanic models, with geometry optimization, molecular dynamics, and a large set of visualization tools. Ghemical relies on external code to provide the quantum-mechanical calculations — MOPAC provides the semi-empirical MNDO, MINDO, AM1, and PM3 methods, and MPQC methods based on Hartree–Fock calculations.
OpenEye Scientific Software is an American software company founded by Anthony Nicholls in 1997. It develops large-scale molecular modelling applications and toolkits. Following OpenEye's acquisition by Cadence Design Systems for $500 million in September 2022, the company was rebranded to OpenEye Cadence Molecular Sciences and operates as a business unit under Cadence.
Open Babel is computer software, a chemical expert system mainly used to interconvert chemical file formats.
Jmol is computer software for molecular modelling chemical structures in 3-dimensions. Jmol returns a 3D representation of a molecule that may be used as a teaching tool, or for research e.g., in chemistry and biochemistry.
The Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) is computer software, a library in the programming language Java, for chemoinformatics and bioinformatics. It is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. It is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) 2.0.
This page describes mining for molecules. Since molecules may be represented by molecular graphs this is strongly related to graph mining and structured data mining. The main problem is how to represent molecules while discriminating the data instances. One way to do this is chemical similarity metrics, which has a long tradition in the field of cheminformatics.
Peter Murray-Rust is a chemist currently working at the University of Cambridge. As well as his work in chemistry, Murray-Rust is also known for his support of open access and open data.
Chemaxon is a cheminformatics and bioinformatics software development company, headquartered in Budapest with 250 employees. The company also has offices in Cambridge, San Diego, Basel and in Prague. and it has distributors in China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia. Chemaxon was acquired by Certara on July 9th, 2024.
Blue Obelisk is an informal group of chemists who promote open data, open source, and open standards; it was initiated by Peter Murray-Rust and others in 2005. Multiple open source cheminformatics projects associate themselves with the Blue Obelisk, among which, in alphabetical order, Avogadro, Bioclipse, cclib, Chemistry Development Kit, GaussSum, JChemPaint, JOELib, Kalzium, Openbabel, OpenSMILES, and UsefulChem.
Avogadro is a molecule editor and visualizer designed for cross-platform use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related areas. It is extensible via a plugin architecture.
Christoph Steinbeck is a German chemist and has a professorship for analytical chemistry, cheminformatics and chemometrics at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Thuringia.
The hierarchical editing language for macromolecules (HELM) is a method of describing complex biological molecules. It is a notation that is machine readable to render the composition and structure of peptides, proteins, oligonucleotides, and related small molecule linkers.
