ChemRuby First Look

Ruby is a dynamic object oriented scripting language. First released in 1995 by a Japanese programmer, it has recently begun to attract a worldwide audience.

The use of Ruby in chemical informatics, although currenly rare, can be expected to increase. One especially interesting project is ChemRuby. Although the website is written in Japanese, there is enough English to get a feel for what ChemRuby is all about.

I was unsuccessful in installing the 1.0 source due to a failed dependency on the Ruby library "dbm". I was, however, able to install version 0.9.3 via RubyGems (sudo gem install chemruby).

The code snippet below creates cyclohexane from the corresponding SMILES string, and then prints out the the number of atoms and molecular weight.

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'chemruby'

mol = SMILES('C1CCCCC1')

puts mol.nodes.size
puts mol.molecular_weight

Browsing the API documentation shows some interesting functionality, including ring perception, cannonical SMILES, and isomorphism detection.