With the profusion of chemical information on the web – in the form of chemical names, images of structures, specific codes (InChI etc), it’s sometimes very useful to be able to seamlessly retrieve some extra information while browsing a page that contains such entities. The usual way is to copy the InChI/SMILES/CAS/name string and paste into Pubchem, Chemspider and so on.

However, a much smoother way is now available via a Firefox extension, called NCATSFind, developed by my colleague. It’s a one click install and once installed, automatically identifies a variety of chemical id codes (CAS number, InChI, UNII) and when such entities are identified uses a variety of backend services to provide context. In addition, it has a cool feature that lets you select an image and generate a structure (using OSRA in the background).

Check out his blog post for more details.