How Would Your Cheminformatics Tool Do This? 2

Reference: Dai, Liu, Zhou, and Nagle J. Nat. Prod.
Posted by Rich Apodaca Mon, 05 Nov 2007 08:27:00 GMT

Reference: Dai, Liu, Zhou, and Nagle J. Nat. Prod.
I'm Rich Apodaca, a chemist and software developer in San Diego, California. By day I run Metamolecular, LLC, maker of ChemWriter™, the 2D chemical structure editor and renderer for Web applications.
Please send questions and comments to: rich...@yahoo.com.
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© 2006-2007 Richard L. Apodaca
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Rich..I like seeing these questions but, as you've seen with previous questions about your challenge, I am generally confused with what your question means. What is the particular challenge you want to deal with here? Is it the darkening of the bonds? Is it the display of text and structures on one page?
Antony,
Thanks for asking. The challenge is how to faithfully represent the axial chirality of the binaphthyl moiety in a format suitable for computerized storage and retrieval.
Most cheminformatics tools (file formats, developer toolkits, and structure editors) simply can't handle the concept of axial chirality.
FlexMol is a file format that can natively deal with axial chirality and several other "difficult" features.
As a more specific example, how is ChemSpider representing enanitomerically enriched (or pure) axially chiral molecules?
Far from being a curiosity in a museum, stereogenicity arising from axial chirality is a fundamental property of many organic molecules - including those with biological activities - as the referenced article (and countless others) highlights. If your care about stereochemistry and computer representation, you should care about axial chirality and computer reperesentation.