About two weeks ago, the ChemConnector blog reported an InChIKey collosion detected by Prof. Goodman. Unlike the previous collision, this one was based solely on the graph and not on stereochemistry. The two molecules both have the InChIKey OCPAUTFLLNMYSX-UHFFFAOYSA-N: The compounds are really different, the molecular formulas are C ₅₀ H ₁₀₂ O and C ₅₇ H ₁₁₄ O respectively.

Geoff Hutchinson blogged about his OS/X ChemSpotLight, an indexing tool for chemistry documents. It’s like, but more advanced than, the kfile_chemical and Kat I have been working on (with others) for the KDE desktop (see earlier blog items). ChemSpotLight currently does more than the KDE tools: it adds Spotlight comments. I assume these are like the Linux extended attributes, used for example by Beagle.

An InChI (or see the FAQ) is a line notation for a molecular structure that was recently developed by the NIST and the IUPAC. Principally they can be applied to protein too (see below), but because proteins would give lenghty InChI’s and are quite well defined in terms of connectivity anyway, those can better be described by their amino acid sequence.

Earlier I reported about postgenomic.com , and needed some diversion from my manuscript work (could no longer think straight about the article I’m working on). So time for some reading up on new technologies. Timing was perfect, because the source code of postgenomic.com got just uploaded to SourceForge SVN.

CDK News 2.3 is scheduled for this month, and origanally planned to be distributed on the CDK5AW event. So, it’s a bit late. But the editorial process is converging… I realized that I forgot to mention the requirement for InChI’s whenever molecules are given.

I’ve just uploaded kfile_chemical 0.9 . It has new translations for ES and DA, and plugins for InChI files. It will extract the InChI string as meta data (and will thus be used by the KDE desktop search Kat , and the InChI version number. Thinking about this, it might be useful to extract all layers as meta data, so that one can search on chemical formula and even connectivity, and find all matching structures.