The InChI Trust, a not-for-profit organisation to expand and develop the InChI open source chemical structure representation algorithm, is formally launched this week. Originally developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), the IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) is an alpha-numeric character string generated by an algorithm.
The InChI was developed as a new, non-proprietary, international standard to represent chemical structures. The Trust aims to develop and improve on the current InChI standard, further enabling the interlinking of chemistry and chemical structures on the web. The connection with IUPAC is maintained through IUPAC's InChI Subcommittee.
The InChI algorithm turns chemical structures into machine-readable strings of information. InChIs are unique to the compound they describe and can encode absolute stereochemistry. A simple analogy is that InChI is the bar-code for chemistry and chemical structures. The InChI format and algorithm are non-proprietary and the software is open source, with ongoing development done by the community.
The InChI Trust was formally incorporated in the UK in May 2009, and now has six charter members: the Royal Society of Chemistry, Nature Publishing Group, FIZ-Chemie Berlin, Symyx Technologies, Taylor & Francis and OpenEye. More organisations and publishers are in the process of joining the InChI Trust.
Since its launch in 2005, widespread take-up of InChI standards by public databases and journals has been observed. Today, there are more than 100 million InChIs in scientific literature and products. Numerous databases, journals and chemical structure drawing programs have incorporated the InChI algorithm. These include the NIST WebBook and mass spectral databases, the NIH/NCBI PubChem database, the NIH/NCI database, the EBI chemistry database, ChemSpider and Symyx Draw.
The initiative serves chemists, publishers, chemical software companies, chemical structure drawing vendors, librarians and intermediaries by creating an international standard to represent defined chemical structures. This is projected to provide a consistent, credible and compatible way for databases of chemical structures to be linked together for the benefit of users of chemical information around the world.
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