This sunday starts the first German Chemoinformatics Conference in Goslar. It’s an interesting programme , with presentations on the InChI, PubChem, 25 years of chemoinformatics, the chemical semantic web, and much more. Among these presentations is mine, on comparing crystal structures (PDF ) and deducing cell parameters. But I’m having a poster on QSAR too.

Yesterday I reviewed an article which published a QSPR model which looked something like: \[y = 151 + 50p1 - 12p2 - 0.006p3\] with quite OK prediction results (R=0.9880). But I was not quite comfortable with the coefficient for the \(p3\) variable. The article did not calculate significances for the coefficients, so it was not obvious from the article wether is was useful to include them. I then looked at the range for p3, which was 110-150;

On the 7th International Conference on Chemical Structures Jeroen Kazius has a poster on finding discriminative substructures, that is, molecular fragments which can be discriminate between two acitivity classes. The software is released as Gaston, is written in C++ and has the GPL license. Later I encountered MoSS which has the same goal, but uses a different algorithm. MoSS is written in Java and uses the LGPL license.

Just finished applying the latest spelling error fixes to CDK News 2.3 . Took me some three hours to finish it up the 12 pages, which has mostly to the need to recompile the PDF after each change to make sure that nothing in the layout got broken.