![]() Undergraduate detox29 has found ChemSketch to be adequate and gxusm told me that they use Symyx Draw user, mainly because that’s what we were taught to use at University. Steven Bachrach of Trinity University is also a Symyx Draw user because of the “nice looking drawings, good structure to name facility, can produce InChIs, easy to use, free to academics, front end into many database systems.” ![]() “Symyx Draw is free for personal or academic use,” she adds. Also, structure and reaction cleanup options are not useful for aesthetics or minimizing space used.īut, chemical informatics expert Wendy Warr, tells me she uses Symyx Draw and its Structure Resolver too. However, the disadvantages are the price but for those who can get an institutional site license. It also has the ability to convert chemical names to structures and vice versa. “It’s pretty easy to figure out the basics, even for beginners,” she says, “but has many options available, like a TLC plate drawing tool, templates/clip art for conformers, glassware, complicated ring structures, and it’s easy to generate and modify figures quality and properties, save as multiple file types for publication. “But, as a physical chemist, I am deeply suspicious of anything with more than 10 atoms.”īiochembelle also uses ChemDraw. Littleghoti says he uses ChemDraw (despite the price), when he has to because it does all he needs. Feels a bit slower and clunkier than the others above. Doesn’t like lower case atom labels either. He adds that Chem ACX is another for looking for available chemicals, basically a ChemDraw type browser plugin, so similarities to that. Labelling atoms is easy, with a fixed list of the most common and a space to fill in your oddballs (it recognizes the elements too, though won’t let you type say zn for zinc, has to be Zn) Atom changes are straightforward too, as you click on the element you want and then just click everywhere you want it.” Then there is eMolecules, which is “mostly for looking for available chemicals, it has a very bare-bones interface, with one panel of tools, but it does the job and has very little load-up time as the Java starts. All the various rings are hidden away in “templates” but there is a lot to choose from, and simply drawing structures is easy. Perrey explains that with ChemSpider, “It seems like there are more steps to get down to drawing than there should be, but once you get there, the interface is functional but smooth. Atom-mapping is useful, but the auto-mapping is occasionally awful - better to do manually. I find it slow to get started, but once it is going, it is quite responsive and easy to use (except copy/pasting structures takes a while, sometimes easier to just redraw the product). ![]() “ChemDraw is perfectly fine, though I have a pet peeve that when I type an atom in lower case ( say n or cl) it fails to recognize that as the element I am putting in.” As far as the java apps go: Reaxys is the browser-based replacement for Beilstein, so I use it a lot. “I use ChemDraw for preparing Powerpoint slides or report figures, but most of the time when I am drawing structures (using a computer at least) it is doing literature searches and/or looking up information on chemicals that I am interested in using,” Perrey explains. Nevertheless, ChemDraw has good functionality, compatibility with colleagues, and produces “good looking drawings”.ĭavidperrey uses ChemDraw, as part of ChemBioOffice 2010, though says that he probably draws more structures using Java apps on ChemSpider/Reaxys/etc. Wozza told me that he uses ChemDraw, but hates how it’s broken on the Mac and lacks support for that platform, it’s also unfortunate that it has broken round trip editing, and poor cut&paste into other applications. The likes fo ChemSketch fair well and others such as Pymol and Symyx seem to be used by specialists in particular areas. The vast majority of users seem to side with ChemDraw, especially those in academia because of the liberal licensing, but they all gripes about compatibility and cutting & pasting. ![]() Sciencebase polled a few contacts via Twitter and LinkedIn to find out what chemical structure packages people are using, what are the pros and cons. Of course, with the likes of PubChem and ChemSpider now available one might wonder whether there is any need to draw one’s own structures from scratch, but plenty of chemists and others still do. Chemical structure drawing is of ongoing interest to chemists so we have a list of programs and reviews by users.
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