SCIENCE@home

The CAOS/CAMM Center: The Dutch national academic facility for computer-assisted organic synthesis and modeling

J. Noordik

Published 2004 in Cheminformatics

ABSTRACT

The development of networks and PCs in the last two decades of the 20th century has fundamentally changed the practice of chemistry, and the union of chemistry and computer science has produced extremely powerful chemical research and educational tools. From the computer technology side much of the innovation was driven by the increasing availability, since the mid 1980s, of small desktop computers with graphics capabilities. From the chemical sciences side the development, around the same time, of algorithms to deal with chemical structures was a major step forward. Communication between chemists and computers now became possible in the basic language of the chemist, the structural formula. The keyboard as input device for long tables with atom names and bonds was replaced by the terminal screen for input of structures and reactions, mimicking a long-time practice in inter-chemist communication in the pre-computer era. By the mid 1980s many papers on computer applications in the more traditional fields of chemistry, like organic synthesis, began to appear not only in the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences but also in more traditional chemical journals. In analogy to its biological counterpart, bioinformatics, the term cheminformatics, or chemoinformatics, came into use to indicate the field. The techniques of computational chemistry, the chemical discipline where computers had been used from the beginning, were often excluded from the definition of the new discipline. Cheminformatics, and more specifically the structure-based consultation of databases with factual chemical data, brought the power of computer technology into the laboratory and to the laboratory bench. The computer search for structural and molecular data, reactions, spectra and other chemical information needed to plan a chemical experiment, gradually replaced the paperwork involved in the usual preliminary library literature search and study. To cope with the rapidly growing

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-45 of 45 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

  • No citing papers are available for this paper.

Showing 0-0 of 0 citing papers · Page 1 of 1