Encryption of chemical information has not been a very common topic in cheminformatics. There was an ACS symposium in 2005 (summary) that had a number of presentations on the topic of “safe exchange” of chemical information – i.e., exchanging information on chemical structures without sharing the structures themselves. The common thread running through many presentations was to […]
“Type-ahead” substructure searches
The other day I was exchanging emails with John Van Drie regarding open challenges in cheminformatics (which I’ll say more about later). One of his comments concerned the slow speed of chemical searches Google searches are screamingly fast, so fast that the type-ahead feature is doing the search as you key characters in. Why are all chemical […]
Substructure Searches – High Speed, Large Scale
My NCTT colleague, Trung Nguyen, recently announced a prototype chemical substructure search system based on fingerprint pre-screening and an efficient in-memory indexing scheme. I won’t go into the detail of the underlying pre-screen and indexing methodology (though the sources are available here). He’s provided a web interface allowing one to draw in substructure queries or […]
Slides from a Guest Lecture at Drexel University
On Thursay I joined Antony Williams as a guest lecturer in Jean Claude-Bradleys‘ class on chemical information retrieval at Drexel University. Using a combination of WebEx and Skype, we were able to give our presentations – seamlessly joining three different locations. Technology is great! Tony gave an excellent talk on citizen science and ChemSpider and […]