ChemWriter 1.3.1 can now be downloaded. This version resolves an EditorApplet issue in which molfiles containing two or more atoms with exactly the same 2D coordinates were not displayed properly.

Details are available on the Metamolecular Company Blog.

ChemWriter is the 2D chemical structure editor designed for Web applications. Lightweight and intuitive, ChemWriter makes an excellent choice for both creating and displaying 2D chemical structures on the Web.

In a move likely to up the ante in the emerging Open Source Drug Discovery movement, GlaxoSmithKline have announced the donation of genomic profiling data for over 300 cancer cell lines to the National Cancer Institute's cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG).

According to NCI's FAQ, caBIG is "an open-source, open-access information network enabling cancer researchers to share tools, data, applications, and technologies according to agreed-upon standards and identified needs." caBIG is comprised of publicly-available datasets and open source software tools designed to interact with them.

This move has potential significance on a number of levels:

• Large pharmaceutical companies haven't generally made a habit out of donating their hard-earned raw intellectual property on this scale. For something this far outside the industry norm, nobody wants to go first; GSK's actions have made the practice a little more respectable.

• caBIG is simultaneously a publicly-accessible database, a set of open data specifications, and an open source software platform. In other words, it's striving to become an end-to-end solution to the problem of open collaboration in the biological sciences.

• Donating raw data directly into an open repository bypasses the established scientific publication model in which data are communicated only as part of a peer-reviewed publication. Should this new publication model continue to gain popularity, it would fundamentally change the way science is conducted.

Credit: Peter Murray-Rust, Peter Suber, and Wired.

OpenAstexViewer is an LGPL-licensed 3D molecular visualization tool written in Java. With the obfuscated jarfile weighing in at 1 MB, OpenAstexViewer could make a good choice for use in Web applications.

There are now at least two open source, feature-rich 3D molecular visualization tools written in Java (the other being Jmol). Are there any others?

Credit: thanks to Noel O'Boyle for spotting this.

This short video shows how to use ChemWriter to draw structures quickly with keyboard shortcuts.

ChemWriter 1.3.0 has been released and is ready for download. This version makes it possible to change the mouse cursor hover radius for more accurate drawing. It also adds a setting to disable heteroatom keyboard shortcut events occurring away from a molecule node, reducing the possibility of an off-atom label being inadvertently drawn.

For details, see the Metamolecular Company Blog.