Category Archives: Chemistry

Chemical Abstracts Service Registry to hit 50 million substances soon

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US CAS REGISTRY on track to register 50 millionth chemical substance – 18 Aug 2009

"Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), a division of the American Chemical Society, has announced that it is on track to register the 50 millionth unique chemical substance on September 7. The CAS REGISTRY claims to be the most comprehensive and high-quality compendium of publicly disclosed chemical information. This milestone comes only 9 months after CAS registered its 40 millionth substance.

REGISTRY is the only integrated comprehensive source of chemical information from a full range of patent and journal literature that is curated and quality controlled by scientists working around the world. For more than 100 years, CAS scientists and colleagues in several nations have meticulously analysed and indexed publicly disclosed global scientific information to build up the unique REGISTRY resource that provides not only chemical names, the unique CAS Registry Number, and vital literature references but also ancillary information such as experimental and predicted property data (boiling and melting points, etc.), commercial availability, preparation details, spectra, and regulatory information from international sources.

CAS scientists follow rigorous criteria that maintain high quality and reliability of information in its REGISTRY. Scientists identify reputable sources and use consistent analysis before registering a substance. REGISTRY is available to scientists through CAS’ product, SciFinder, and its STN family of products. With these advanced search and analysis technologies, CAS helps scientists find reliable information that is vital to their research process."
 

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 8/18/09

International Chemical Identifier (InChI)

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InChIs, are machine-readable, alpha-numeric character strings first developed by International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC),  Now the InChI Trust is carrying on the work to develop and expand the algorithms for open source accessibility of even more chemical structures.

From Today’s Knowledgespeak Newsletter:

"The InChI algorithm turns chemical structures into machine-readable strings of information. InChIs are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry. A simple analogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chemistry and chemical structures. The InChI format and algorithm are non-proprietary and the software is open source, with ongoing development done by the community."

"Since its launch in 2005, widespread take-up of InChI standards by public databases and journals has been observed. Today, there are more than 100 million InChIs in scientific literature and products. Numerous databases, journals and chemical structure drawing programs have incorporated the InChI algorithm. These include the NIST WebBook and mass spectral databases, the NIH/NCBI PubChem database, the NIH/NCI database, the EBI chemistry database, ChemSpider and Symyx Draw."

Nature Chemistry — new online journal from Nature Publishing Group

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Nature Chemistry — the second issue is now online, and covers a wide range of topics, including catalysis, mesoporous materials, synthetic methodology, anion transport, and DNA conductivity. In addition, there is a commentary about pre-university chemical education, a review article on Mobius aromaticity and a thesis article that looks at alternative forms of the periodic table.

[Princeton University Library has subscribed, but for a time, it’s free to all.]

Source: an email announcement from Nature Publishing Group