Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 5, Issue 1; July 2002

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman


(1)
Open Source Biology
Washington Monthly has an article on how open-source biology. Molecular biology probably has the best examples of any scientific discipline open-source computer programs playing a fundamental role. Can biological techniques and information also be 'open source'?. The concept is the "antithesis of corporatized research". Can it change the way new biology is discovered and exploited?

(2)
NCI DIS
The National Cancer Institute 3D structure database: a collection of 3D structures (Chem-X generated) for over 400,000 drugs

(3)
http://www.spectroscopynow.com/
The on-line resource serving the spectroscopy community, from Wiley. It describes itself as a "Community of Interest" website, launched on May 1, 2001, and it "will be the definitive spectroscopy resource on the internet" covering all major spectroscopic techniques. It contains news, articles and links to other WWW resources. It also covers Proteomics and Chemometrics.

(4)
Chemometrics
Chemometrics is the study of chemical data. Many web sites exist, including:

(5)
Handbook of Fluorescent Probes and Research Products
This on-line handbook contains a large amount of background and technical information, including spectra, on the product line (over 2600 compounds) of Molecular Probes.

(6)
XML namespace
XML namespaces are a mechanism to prevent elements and attributes within XML documents being confused when the documents are combined. The XML namespaces recommendation provides a system to do this. The United States Congress is taking notice (XML and Legislative Documents). "The purpose of this website is to provide information related to the ongoing work of the U.S. House of Representatives in relation to the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Under the direction of the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration and the House Committee on Administration, the Secretary of the Senate and the Clerk of the House have worked together with the Library of Congress and the Government Printing Office to create Document Type Definition files (DTDs) for use in the creation of legislative documents using XML."

(7)
Cresset Biomolecular Discovery
This company has a new approach, termed XEDs (extended electron distributions) to better understand the electronic properties of molecules. This technology has led to improved conformational profiles of molecules and better binding energy alculations

(8)
A simulated intestine!
Simulations-plus are a software company which can supply a simulated intestine, a useful tool for modelling how drugs may be absorbed, distributed, metabolised and excreted in the human gastrointestinal tract.

(9)
Internet scale operating system
Authors of Seti@home envisage an internet scale operating system. This would require huge network bandwidth, but 10 GB ethernet has now been demonstrated, which may lead to new possibilities for distributed supercomputing and remote visualisation.

(10)
UDRP
Domain name dispute resolution - a website maintained by Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa Law School, containing studies of how disputes have been resolved.

(11)
NAS and wavelets
Wavelets, are a mathematical modelling technique which are more effective that Fourier transforms for some applications, including electronic image formats and the FBI's fingerprint database. This article describes the development of the method.

(12)
SPARC
The scholarly publishing and academic resources coalition is campaigning for more competition in scholarly publishing to make research articles in all academic fields more accessible. A recent interview with the CEO of Elsevier suggests that Tetrahedron Letters has more content thant SPARC's Organic Letters and therefore is actually cheaper to access on a per article basis.

© 2002 J M Goodman, Cambridge
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