Today’s tribute to the power of simplicity comes by way of John Jaeger, who has built one of the simplest cheminformatics Web applications ever written. His creation, CampDepict, interactively produces a raster image of a 2D chemical structure given a SMILES string, not unlike Daylight’s Depict application. CampDepict uses the Ruby Web microframework Camping.

Deepak Singh recently started an interesting discussion (and follow-up about the need for organizations that help early-stage bioscience startups in the same way that YCombinator does in the Web space.

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. What’s the secret to making money on the Web? David Heinemeier Hansson’s talk at Startup School 2008 offers a much-needed, but all too easy to ignore, dose of reality.

Printed encyclopedias of chemical information like the Merck Index suffer from the problem of becoming obsolete on publication. When new compounds are discovered, or when the information about a compound changes, those changes can take many months or years to appear in print form due to the high cost of publication. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The creation of free chemical databases continues unabated. Today’s entry is Pherobase, a service dedicated to documenting the relationship between chemical structures and the insect world. Users can search Pherobase by text, or browse a large number of precompiled categories: alphabetical by genus; alphabetical by species; and compounds by genus or species.

An alert Depth-First reader pointed me to the new ACS policy for authors receiving NIH funding. The details are contained in a document outlining two ways authors can choose to comply with the new law requiring recipients of NIH funds to deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into PubMed Central. The choices are: Publish the article under ACS Author Choice by paying a fee.

PubChem and Wikipedia represent two of the largest open repositories of chemical information in the world. And they complement each other very nicely. PubChem contains mainly low-level chemical structure information whereas Wikipedia contains free-text descriptions of chemical compounds in the form of compound monographs. Both services offer permission and access to copy and reuse their contents.

Good news for cheminformatics: Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) has agreed to help Wikipedia users curate its collection of CAS numbers. As a result of the diligence of some hard-working volunteers, chemistry’s most universal system for referring to chemicals can now be used far more effectively by the worlds biggest open repository of knowledge. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to pull these CAS numbers from Wikipedia programmatically?

The Columbus Dispatch reported yesterday that an Ohio jury had decided against the ACS for $27 million in a dispute with the founders of Leadscope, Inc. The case was a countersuit by Leadscope, who alleged that Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) had damaged their company in pursuing an earlier lawsuit.