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.
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.
The International Chemical Identifier is a textual identifier for chemical substances, designed to provide a standard way to encode molecular information and to facilitate the search for such information in databases and on the web. Initially developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2000 to 2005, the format and algorithms are non-proprietary. Since May 2009, it has been developed by the InChI Trust, a nonprofit charity from the United Kingdom which works to implement and promote the use of InChI.
Open Babel is computer software, a chemical expert system mainly used to interconvert chemical file formats.
JOELib is computer software, a chemical expert system used mainly to interconvert chemical file formats. Because of its strong relationship to informatics, this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling. It is available for Windows, Unix and other operating systems supporting the programming language Java. It is free and open-source software distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0.
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.
Henry Stephen Rzepa is a chemist and Emeritus Professor of Computational chemistry at Imperial College London.
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.
The Bioclipse project is a Java-based, open-source, visual platform for chemo- and bioinformatics based on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP).
Apache Taverna was an open source software tool for designing and executing workflows, initially created by the myGrid project under the name Taverna Workbench, then a project under the Apache incubator. Taverna allowed users to integrate many different software components, including WSDL SOAP or REST Web services, such as those provided by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the European Bioinformatics Institute, the DNA Databank of Japan (DDBJ), SoapLab, BioMOBY and EMBOSS. The set of available services was not finite and users could import new service descriptions into the Taverna Workbench.
ChemSpider is a freely accessible online database of chemicals owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry. It contains information on more than 100 million molecules from over 270 data sources, each of them receiving a unique identifier called ChemSpider Identifier.
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.
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.
The Journal of Cheminformatics is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal that covers cheminformatics and molecular modelling. It was established in 2009 with David Wild and Christoph Steinbeck as founding editors-in-chief, and was originally published by Chemistry Central. At the end of 2015, the Chemistry Central brand was retired and its titles, including Journal of Cheminformatics, were merged with the SpringerOpen portfolio of open access journals.
Antony John Williams is a British chemist and expert in the fields of both nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and cheminformatics at the United States Environmental Protection Agency. He is the founder of the ChemSpider website that was purchased by the Royal Society of Chemistry in May 2009. He is a science blogger and an author.
Chemicalize is an online platform for chemical calculations, search, and text processing. It is developed and owned by ChemAxon and offers various cheminformatics tools in freemium model: chemical property predictions, structure-based and text-based search, chemical text processing, and checking compounds with respect to national regulations of different countries.
The Herman Skolnik Award is awarded annually by the Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society, "to recognize outstanding contributions to and achievements in the theory and practice of chemical information science". As of 2011 the award is of 3,000 US dollars.
Christoph Steinbeck is a German chemist and has a professorship for analytical chemistry, cheminformatics and chemometrics at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena in Thuringia.
