Joerg Wegner recently blogged about Chemogenomics: structuring the drug discovery process to gene families by C.J. Harris and A. P. Stevens in Drug Discov Today (DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2006.08.013). This review article provides a nice overview of a trend in mathematical modelling of the interaction of small organic molecules with proteins, often referred to as QSAR.

I have heard that bioinformatics is ahead of chemoinformatics. However, I discoverd that this is not necessarily the case, while preparing for a homology modeling course I gave this week at the CUBIC. Open Access is really no issue there, with open access journals and many open access databases. But it is different when it comes down to open source software.

Together with Christoph, Christian and Jerome, I will be representing the Blue Obelisk movement on the first First Workshop on Chemoinformatics in Europe with the topic Research and Teaching . Though I wonder what this theme excludes? Development? Can’t imagine that commercials companies will not be represented as usual. Moreover, it will likely include some bioinformatics too, unless you consider that to deal with sequences only.

BioMed Central is setting up a new peer-reviewed, open access journal Source Code for Biology and Medicine. It will “encompass all aspects of workflow for information systems, decision support systems, client user networks, database management, and data mining” . Basically, anything that fits into chem-bla-ics. (Thanx to Werner, for pointing me to the website!) The ‘source code’ aspect is the interesting thing of this new journal.

Gemma Holiday’s article on CMLReact was published in the january issue of the JCIM (doi:10.1021/ci0502698), which seems to be marked as sample issue right now. She used CMLReact as data format for MACiE (see doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/bti693), a database of 100 enzyme reactions, with fully annotated reaction mechanisms, making this an remarkable and insightfull database.

Roland Krause discussed today in his blog Notes from the Biomass an interesting website: postgenomic.com . This website, still marked BETA, mines blogs in the field of genomics and extract noteworthy statistics from it: which articles are cited in those blogs. For example, the most discussed article is Kai Wang’s Gene-function wiki would let biologists pool worldwide resources in Nature.

If you have read my previous post and visited that other blog, you might have noted the Technorati keywords . Or tags, really, as explained in this rel=”tag” microformat. Adding them to blog items, will enable indexing by Technorati, one of the bigger blog search engines. So, from now on, you’ll see these tags in my items too, hoping they don’t get annoying.