Chemical Informatics Letters

Volume 7, Issue 4; October 2003

Editor: Jonathan M Goodman

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The UK Biobank: The UK Biobank project will be the world's biggest resource for the study of the role of nature and nurture in health and disease, The project will follow the health of a large group of volunteers for many years, collecting information on environmental and lifestyle factors and linking these to medical records and biological samples, and anonymised data will be used for research. It is run as a charitable company funded by the Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust. The BBC reports that detailed rules on ethics and governance have now been published.
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Dewey Decimal System: The Dewey Decimal system is now more than a hundred years old, and is widely used by libraries across the world. Despite its long use, the system is not in the public domain, but is owned by the OCLC (Online computer library center), a non-profit organisation, and so licenses for its use are available.
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Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Science: George A W Milne is retiring as editor of The Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Science (JCICS). William L Jorgensen of Yale University is taking over, and intends to split into the journal into two (C&E News article: subscribers only). The new journals, which may be launched in 2005, may be called The Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling and The Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation.
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MDL data interchange format: MDL publishes its file formats and they are widely used. It has now developed a new data interchange format, the XDfile, which is XML-based. This format specification is available on the same web page.
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eCheminformatics 2003: 10th-14th November: eCheminformatics 2003 is an international conference to be held on the Internet which brings together researchers to discuss the applications of Cheminformatics methods to Drug Discovery. It is organised by Barry Hardy who has organised numerous international virtual conferences in the area of the chemical, life and medical sciences and is currently chairing the EU-supported Eurotron Virtual Conferences in Glycobiology, manages the Eyeforpharma Knowledge Management Hub and the Cheminformatics Hub and Virtual Conferences.
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$10 million NIH grant for proteomics centre: The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has won a five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to support a centre for basic research in proteomics. It is the largest NIH grant in the lab's 38-year history.
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Biology on ArXiv e-print server: The ArXiv server was a physics server, but now has a (Quantitative) Biology section.
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PLoS: Public Library of Science: The first journal in the Public Library of Science: PLoS Biology launched its first issue on October 13, 2003. Unlike most other journals, reading the papers is free, but authors pay $ 1500 to get a paper published. Will this lead to a revolution in the open access to knowledge ( Berlin Declaration)? Soon after its release, the journal attracted so much interest that its webserver could not cope with the demand.
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Instructional Resources for Chemistry: This site provides annotated Web links to instructional materials and other resources of interest to Chemistry teachers and course designers, maintained by Steve Lower, a retired member of staff from Simon Fraser University.
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Comb-e-chem: Comb-e-Chem is on of the Uk's national e-science projects, run by Jeremy Frey. It is working on Grid-enabled combinatorial chemistry, concentrating on crystallography and laser and surface chemistry, and is also interested in making tea, without a traditional laboratory note book.
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Structural Database of Allergenic Proteins: This database is run from the University of Texas Medical Branch. It consists of a Web server that integrates a database of allergenic proteins with various bioinformatics tools for performing structural studies related to allergens and characterization of their epitopes.
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General and organic chemistry pages: These pages, designed by Professor Gerard Dupuis at the lycee Faidherbe de Lille, describe a number of chemical reactions and phenomena, including the oscillating Belousov-Zhabotinski reaction.