NewsletterIssue 57
Summer 2001
Newsletter
Issue 57
Summer 2001
This award was established by the ACS Division of Chemical Information to recognise outstanding
contributions to and achievements in the theory and practice of chemical information science. The
Division of Chemical Information hopes the award will encourage the continuing advancement of
chemical information science in areas such as:
Design of new and unique computerised information systems;
Preparation and dissemination of chemical information;
Editorial innovations;
Design of new indexing, classification, and notation systems;
Chemical nomenclature;
Structure-activity relationships; and
Numerical data correlation and evaluation.
The Award consists of a $2000 honorarium and a plaque. The recipient is expected to give an address
at the time of the Award presentation at the 222th American Chemical Society National Meeting. In
recent years, the Award Symposium has been organised by the recipient.
The deadline for nominations for the 2002 Award is July 1, 2001. Nomination letters should describe
the nominee’s contributions to the field of chemical information and should include supportive
materials such as a biographical sketch and a list of publications and presentations. Three seconding
letters are also required. Nominations should be sent to:
Joanne Witiak,
CINF Awards Chair,
Rohm and Haas Co.
727 Norristown Rd.,
Spring House, PA 19477
USA.
For more information see www.lib.uchicago.edu/cinf/skolnik.html
The Chemical Structure Association Trust is an internationally recognised Trust established to promote education, research or development in the area of systems and methods for the storage, processing and retrieval of information about chemical structures, reactions and compounds.
Applications are invited for the Year 2001 Chemical Structure Association Trust Award. The Trust is offering an Award of up to two thousand pounds sterling for the best applicant seeking funds for education or research in chemical information. The Award will be announced and presented at the International Chemical Information Meeting in Annecy in October.
Anyone working in the field of chemical information research can apply and application can be made for funds to attend a relevant conference, for travel (e.g. to collaborate with another research group) or for hardware or software to assist with the research project. The award is unlikely to be given exclusively for hardware and software.
The application should include:
A statement of academic qualifications
The Trust has previously supported the continuation of research studies in biomedical interactions including molecular recognition processes and drug design; a novel combination of reaction indexing and synthesis planning; clustering of chemical structures for property prediction; and investigation of reaction mechanisms. The work of younger scientists in developing countries has also been made possible in conjunction with some of the awards.
Recent award winners, and their areas of research, are as follows:
Applications must be submitted by 30 May 2001, preferably by e-mail, to:
Professor Michael Lynch,
Chairman of the Awards sub-committee,
m.lynch@sheffield.ac.uk
Any postal applications should be sent to:
Dr Clive Weeks,
Secretary, Chemical Structure Association Trust
39 Rounton Road,
Church Crookham,
Fleet,
Hants, GU52 6JH
UK
The CSA Annual Dinner was held on the traditional Monday evening before the London Online Meeting, at what is now becoming its traditional location in a stately private dining room in the elegant Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street, London.
A wide cross-section of the CSA membership and guests gathered before dinner to sip mulled wine, renew old acquaintanceships, and catch up on news. In addition to representatives from industry (both providers and consumers of information), academia, and the gainfully self-employed, we were pleased to welcome the former president of the CSA, Professor Michael Lynch and his wife, and the current president, Professor Peter Willett. The picture above shows your intrepid reporter (right) mingling with long-time CSA stalwarts Trevor Devon (left, newly retired from Pfizer) and Guenter Grethe of MDL (centre, newly elected chair of the CSA Trust and the 2001 Skolnik Award recipient).
After pre-dinner aperitifs we were seated round an imposing 20-seater table, and started the meal by pulling Christmas crackers. These were very impressive top-of-the-line models, complete with the usual, but very well-appointed, hat, joke and game. In some cases the latter was a set of marbles, which in one unfortunate incident leapt from the pulled cracker into the crab bisque. After we had dispensed with the variety of ‘losing one’s marbles’ jokes, we donned the stylishly tasteful hats, told jokes, and then got down to the serious business of enjoying an excellent dinner - roasted bresse chicken, Christmas pudding soufflé, and coffee and mince pies - with very pleasant company. CSA Chair Janet Ash is to be commended for selecting such an elegant location for the dinner (and for having such excellent familial connections in the hotel trade!) and I hope we see more new faces at the 2001 dinner.
Phil McHale
David Bradley
Combinatorial chemistry is the art of converting a handful of ingredients into thousands upon thousands of new materials from a few building blocks. Drug discovery teams make huge lead compound libraries for biological testing and materials chemists can create arrays of catalysts, new ceramics or semiconductors and scour them for interesting properties. Any big library is useless, however, without tracking software. Librarians label their books with a barcode but attaching barcodes to 100,000 molecules is difficult even with the development of chip-on-bead technology. As in a book library, software can bring order.
MDL subsidiary Afferent Systems has focused its efforts on combochem software, such as that for library generation. Afferent Suite version 2.2 provides tools for storing, accessing, displaying, and interpreting and tracking all kinds of information produced in combochem. Within the Afferent system, Afferent Structure forms the suite’s core. This program classifies combinatorial product structures and tracks their physical locations and other data for each compound, such as its synthetic scheme and, critically, its location in the arrays of wells on a reaction plate. In fact, the program’s interface hinges on a schematic reaction plate allowing maps of compounds to be analysed and relationships between structural types and their activity spotted.
Synopsys Accord for Excel plug-in with its CombiChem Add-On meanwhile brings chemical awareness to spreadsheets. Combinatorial libraries can be defined, stored and enumerated using the reaction approach rather than generic structure approach, which, Synopsys says, is more intuitive to chemists. In Accord, a combinatorial library is represented as a set of reagents and a reaction scheme, made up of one or more reactions. Enumeration generates the reaction products in each step or the explicit reaction, depending on user preferences. The CombiChem Add-On offers a ‘wizard’ option, leading users through defining and enumerating their library. At any point, chemical spreadsheet operations, such as molecular property calculations, can be used to filter reagent and product lists. Libraries like to have shelves stacked with a broad literature cross-section. But, diversity in a hospital medical library, for instance, would generate only rare hits with cookery books unlikely to leave the shelves. Diversity becomes yet another parameter requiring definition. The combinatorial chemist generates thousands of molecules with diverse chemical structures. Only a handful, however, will be ‘read’ by a target receptor, in the case of a drug, or an industrial feedstock, for a catalyst, so diversity does not necessarily improve hits. Too specific a library though and it is harder to find the book you need. The specialist reference on painkillers, that a junior doctor needs, might not appear on the shelves of a library focusing on paediatrics. A library of bulky molecules that are soluble only in organic solvents is unlikely to yield an orally active painkiller.
Filling the shelves with as diverse a selection of books as possible or focusing on a single type of book is not the answer - and leads to minimal hits. If you use the library in-out inventory to track the hits on individual books and each individual type of book, you can spot the borrowing patterns and adjust the stock accordingly. The Afferent system does this by building new libraries. It uses a reaction-based approach to generate structures. Usually, a structure-based approach is employed, which defines a central core point within the starting compounds and identifies points to which additional chemical components can be attached. The reaction-based, or ‘virtual chemistry’ method, looks at the reaction sequences used simulating each step as though they were being synthesised at the bench. This simplifies the chemistry, allowing chemists to avoid identifying core structures or having to rationalise attachment points. The chemist can then ask of the suite questions such as ‘What compound is in reaction well F5 on plate 4351 and how was it made?’
Numerous companies produce molecular similarity software. The packages find potentially useful groups and generate close cousins. A large library of benzodiazepines and related compounds might contain a subset of similar compounds that are likely to have a particular medicinal property. Software can generate a daughter library based on these similar structures.
Tripos too provides a way of handling combinatorial libraries. Their CombiLibMaker is fast and intuitive, the company says, allowing virtual libraries to be created, read and written with all the standard 2D and 3D structural database formats. Virtual combinatorial libraries provide several opportunities such as allowing screening ‘in silico’ using virtual high throughput screening (vHTS). Models relating structure and activity are exploited to target biological activity.
CambridgeSoft’s ChemOffice suite can also handle combinatorial information. When a combochem workbook is opened in the package, ChemDraw generates a standard reaction scheme. Interpretation produces worksheets for each generic reactant. Users upload their reagent lists from their database; these are enumerated to produce the library. Physiological properties can be predicted based on property calculations and decisions made about which materials to synthesise.
ACD/Labs’ software allows properties of molecules to be predicted and analysed efficiently. Their Combi-NMR (screenshot above) can handle large quantities of analytical data. A user can build a database containing some 100,000 spectra, with or without their associated structures and related text. Databases are searchable on structure, substructure, full spectrum, single or multi sub-spectra, and through text fields. As with much combinatorial software, the familiar 96-well reaction plate format is used as a graphical metaphor for the ‘locations’ of compounds produced.
Software streamlines combochem bookkeeping and allows targeted product synthesis. Vast libraries that exist in silico can be whittled away automatically on the basis of computer selection guided by the properties predicted for individual groups of members. Only the best leads are synthesised or picked off the shelf to become the next blockbuster drug, catalyst or material. The automation of library creation, compound selection, synthesis and testing may all be done by computer and robot arms handling thousands of compounds at a time with a hit rate higher than possible through any discovery techniques. Chemists will have more time to spend on other pursuits...such as reading that book...
www.tripos.com
www.acdlabs.com
www.afferent.com
www.daylight.com
www.combichemlab.com
www.mdli.com
David Bradley is a freelance science writer. He can be reached through his Elemental Discoveries web site www.sciencebase.com
Our initial work has focused on the development of algorithms for converting an input organic chemical structure to a unique (canonical) form. This, in effect, involves the unique numbering of each atom, with equivalent atoms being assigned identical numbers. ‘Serialising’ the result to create an IChI string is the final, straightforward, step in creating an identifier.
As discussed in the meeting of the IChI committee last August, most of the ideas employed in this work have been reported in the technical literature. The principal task of this project has been to identify and implement a workable, robust set of procedures that will provide effective IChI processing for a large proportion of organic chemical structures in common use.
It was agreed to develop a ‘layered’ approach, where different levels of structural information are separately represented in the IChI identifier. Work has consequently proceeded by step-by-step building of the individual layers. Since the order of application of the layers could affect the final labelling, this process somewhat more complex that might initially appear.
The layers under development are:
Initial implementation and testing of this work have been completed, with the exception of the
following two items:
Representing stereochemistry in systems with moving (mesomeric) bonds and electrons.
Representing H-migration tautomerism in systems containing 5-membered rings.
The first of these items does not seem to have been addressed adequately in the literature, although appropriate processing algorithms have been found in mathematical journals. We hope to complete these remaining tasks within two months and then to implement the IChI processor as a standalone program that can automatically process standard &lq;&lq;MOL-files&rq;&rq;. When this is available, assistance will be sought to further test, and possibly refine the IChI name generation process.
Depending on results of these tests and discussions, it will be decided whether improvements or additional features are desirable, and, if so, whether these need to be followed by another round of testing. For instance, it needs to be determined whether the first version should allow a canonical representation of partially-specified stereochemical structures.
Finally, there are no plans to include the following structural representations in the first version: non C-atom sp2 and sp3 stereochemistry ring-chain tautomerism (or any other variety not involving simple H-migration) non-covalent bonds.
Steve Heller
At the AGM, attended by 19 members, we were sorry to say farewell to three of our key Officers: Barbara Nicholson, General Secretary; Eleanor Ricketts, Treasurer, and Gez Cross, Membership Secretary. We thank them all very much for all their hard work on the Executive Committee, and we are very grateful to them for their contributions and commitment to the CSA. It was a great pleasure to present the year 2000 Ernie Hyde award to Gez Cross, who served on the Executive Committee for six years, including four years as Membership Secretary. Congratulations, Gez!
We were very fortunate that David Walsh, former Secretary, was prepared to step back in. David is now working at Pfizer Global Research and Development at Sandwich. Suzanne Pears, a former student friend of Eleanor Ricketts and now working at AstraZeneca in Loughborough, was elected Treasurer. John Holliday, who has in the past been responsible for preparing the Newsletter for the web, and for mailing your Newsletters, was the ideal person to take over as Membership Secretary. In addition, we are delighted to welcome Sue Jackson from Roche onto the Committee. A very warm welcome to them all. You can read a brief biography of Suzanne below.
Members voted at the AGM to make some selective increases to the membership subscriptions. The UK full subscription will go up from £20 to £25, but the student subscription will remain at £10. However, the US full subscription will remain at $35, whilst the student subscription will increase from $10 to $15. The French and German subscriptions are unchanged this year, but will be increased at the next AGM. The last time the subscriptions were raised was in 1993 when the UK subs were raised to £20. This year’s increase in subscription is to cover our increasing administration costs, including those incurred in production of the Newsletter. It was suggested at the AGM that it would be better to make a small increase annually than a larger increase after a number of years.
Targets and future plans were on the Agenda for the AGM. At the present time, there are no plans to pursue a merger with like-minded groups such as the MGMS or the RSC Chemical Information Group. However, the Executive Committee will be looking into the possibility of incorporating the activities of the CSA within the framework of the CSA Trust. Although legally unrelated, the activities of the two organisations frequently overlap, and there is often confusion, within and outside the CSA, about the roles of the CSA and the CSA Trust. We will be seeking legal advice to see if there are any perceived difficulties with combining the two organisations, and we will keep you informed of progress.
| President Professor Peter Willett Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 2TN, UK Tel: +44-(0)114-222-2633 e-mail: p.willett@sheffield.ac.uk |
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| Chair Janet Ash The Roundel Frittenden Cranbrook Kent TN17 2EP, UK Tel/Fax: +44-(0)1580-852270 e-mail: ash@euronet.nl |
Vice Chair Peter Nichols Hampden Data Services Highstone House 165 High Street Barnet Herts EN5 5SU, UK Tel: +44-(0)20-8441-7495 Fax: +44-(0)20-8364-8382 e-mail: hdspeter.aol.com |
| General Secretary David Walsh Pfizer Global Research and Development Tel: +44-(0)1304-645619 e-mail: david_j_walsh@sandwich.pfizer.com |
Treasurer Suzanne Pears AstraZeneca R&D Charnwood Tel: +44-(0)1509-644384 Fax: +44-(0)1509-645570 e-mail: suzanne.pears@astrazeneca.com |
| Membership Secretary Dr John Holliday Research Manager Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 2TN, UK Tel: +44-(0)114-222-2685 e-mail: J.D.Holliday@sheffield.ac.uk |
Web Site Administrator Dr. Robert Brown Molecular Simulations Inc. 9685 Scranton Road San Diego, CA 92121, USA Tel: +1-(858)-799-5563 Fax: +1-(858)-799-0136 e-mail: rbrown@msi.com |
| Ordinary Members | |
| Helen Schofield Library and Information Service UMIST PO Box 88 Sackville Street Manchester M60 1QD, UK Tel: +44-(0)161-200-4420 Fax: +44-(0)161-200-4941 e-mail: helen.schofield@umist.ac.uk |
Dr. Peter F. Rusch 355 Verano Drive Los Altos CA 94022, USA Tel/Fax: +1-(415)-941-8120 e-mail: pfrusch@aol.com |
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Bryan A. Vickery Community Development Manager ChemWeb, Inc. 84 Theobald’s Road Holborn London WC1X 8RR, UK Direct: +44-(0)20-7611-4424 Main: +44-(0)20-7611-4300 Fax: +44-(0)20-7611-4301 e-mail: bryan.vickery@chemweb.com |
Sue Jackson Roche Products Limited, Tel: +44-(0)1707-366392 Fax: +44-(0)1707-373504 e-mail: susan.jackson@roche.com |
Born and raised in Germany, Guenter Grethe obtained his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Braunschweig in 1961. After postgraduate study at the University of Wisconsin, Guenter joined Hoffmann-LaRoche, Nutley, NJ, as a research chemist. A sabbatical in 1972 at Princeton University with Todd Wipke introduced Guenter to the use of computers in chemistry, and led him to introduce MDL software at Roche and ultimately to responsibility for the CASP program in Nutley. After 22 years with Roche he joined MDL Information Systems, Inc. where he is now Director Scientific Applications in the Research Group of Product Development.
His main interests lie in the area of reaction databases and reaction data management software and applications. Guenter has published extensively and has given presentations at scientific meetings on topics in synthetic chemistry and reaction retrieval. He was the originator of over 20 patents while at Roche.
Guenter is a member of the Society of German Chemists (GDCH) and the American Chemical Society and several of its divisions (CINF, COMP, MEDI, ORGN). Over the past 15 years, he has been very active in the CINF Division organising symposia, as a member of the Program and Education Committee, and serving as Program Chair and Chair of the Division. He initiated and organised the first National Chemical Information Symposium in 1994, chaired the International Conference on Chemical Structures in 1996 and 1999, and will do so again in 2002. He organised a symposium at Pacifichem2000 and an interdivisional Biotechnology Secretariat symposium at the ACS meeting in San Diego. He is presently Secretary General of the Biotechnology Secretariat of the ACS.
We are pleased to announce the full programme for the conference organised jointly by the CSA and Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society (MGMS). We are now open for registration for the conference. There is a £20 reduction for CSA and MGMS members. For more details about the conference, including information about registering and a full list of papers, visit the web site at cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2001, (or email j.d.holliday@shef.ac.uk). The following is a draft list of speakers and titles, and may change.
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1 April Electronic Chemistry Publishing S. Lin and P. F. Rusch, Organisers | |
| 1:30pm | Chemistry preprint server: A revolution in chemistry communication J.R. Weeks, B. A. Vickery |
| 2:00pm | Electronic journals from the Royal Society of Chemistry J. S. Humphrey, R. Parker |
| 2:30pm | Electronic chemistry conferences: Seven years of CONFCHEM S. E. Van Bramer, D. Rosenthal, B. Tissue |
| 3:00pm | Electronic chemistry publishing: A librarian’s perspective D. L. Roth, K. Douglas |
| 3:30pm | Integrated web publications for crystallography B. McMahon |
| 2 April | |
| 9:00am | Future of electronic chemistry publication S. M. Bachrach |
| 9:30am | Science of synthesis: Transformation of a classical tertiary reference work for synthetic
chemistry into a comprehensive electronic source of evaluated information G. F. Herrmann |
| 10:00am | Stanford University’s HighWire Press: Continuing to raise the bar in electronic
journal publishing V. Reich, G. A. Baysinger |
| 10:3am | Supplementing full text journals with factual databases J. Rumble Jr., A. Y. Lee, D. Blakeslee, S. Young |
| 11:00am | Electronic chemistry publication in China W. Zhao, R. Xu, S. Lin |
| 1:30pm | Electronic conference on synthetic organic chemistry S. Lin, A. Gutnov, S. Lin, C. D. Nager |
| 2:00pm | Hunting for free chemical journal articles on the World Wide Web S. Yu |
| 2:30pm | Ullmann’s Encyclopedia of Industrial Chemistry From print to electronic. A. Eckerle |
This is an Oracle-based, object-oriented knowledge base from MDL. Until this release, the Afferent product suite focused primarily on tasks associated with combinatorial chemistry. Afferent TeamWorks 3.0 extends the suite's reach, helping chemists plan, archive, and analyse chemical data produced by both classical organic and high-throughput synthetic techniques. New features include:
Gentech, a French plant biotechnology and bioinformatics company, have developed Biotechnix(R) 3D, a software package for DNA and protein sequence analysis for the Mac. This software provides direct links to database and sequence analysis sites and reduces the need to use several different packages for each particular stage of the analysis process. The extremely user-friendly interface provides a versatile tool to organise sequences and results. Liquid crystal glasses are provided with the software and allow visualisation of protein sequences in 3D and navigation through the interior of molecules. For more information, visit http://www.gentech.fr
The latest release of Accord for Excel offers enhanced substructure searching and improved visualisation capabilities through integration with WebLab ViewerLite from Molecular Simulations Inc. (MSI). The new version allows the user to specify atom and bond query features in substructure searches. Other new features of Accord for Excel V3.1.4 include an R-group substituent wizard for the modification of the underlying substituent library and definition of substituents that used regularly in R-Group analysis. There is more information on the Synopsys web site at http://www.synopsys.co.uk/
ChemWeb, Inc. has announced that the ISI Reaction Citation Index is now live on ChemWeb.com. The Reaction Citation Index combines searchable structures and reaction data from Current Chemical Reactions with bibliographic data and author abstracts from the Science Citation Index. It covers data from newly registered world patents and organic chemistry journals from 1980 to the present. It offers complete reaction information, including concise descriptions of the latest syntheses, detailed experimental conditions, full reaction flows, product yields and cited reference searching.
Six NMR spectral and physical property databases from Advanced Chemistry Development (ACD) are now live on ChemWeb.com. The fully searchable databases launched on the site include: pKa, LogP, HNMR; CNMR, FNMR, PNMR. There is further information on these databases at http://www.chemweb.com
Linking from the Derwent patent abstract to an image of the full patent document on the MicroPatent website via the Derwent Discovery web interface is now available for all current year Derwent WDA abstracts onwards. There will be approximately 20,000 live links by the end of 2001. After clicking on the link, customers can display, print or download the PDF formatted documents. All full patent document requests will be archived for 36 hours, enabling users to review their recent selections. Access to the full patent images will be offered by annual subscription, in addition to the basic Derwent WDA subscription. Subscribers to this additional service will gain unlimited access to the full patent documents at the same level of User Banding as their Derwent Discovery account. Current subscribers to Derwent WDA via Derwent Discovery can set up a week’s free trial of this service by contacting their local Derwent Help Desk. Web sites: http://www.derwent-discovery.com http://www.micropat.com.
1-6 April: 221th ACS National Meeting. Includes CSA/CINF symposium, see page 12. Contact ACS Meetings Department, 1155 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington DC 20036, US. Tel: +1-(202)-872- 4396; fax: +1-(202)-872-6128; e-mail: natlmtgs@acs.org; internet: www.acs.org/meetings/
9-11 April: 2nd Joint CSA/MGMS Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics: Computational Tools for Lead Discovery, Stephenson Hall, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Programme on page 8.
11-12 April: 1st Annual Structure-Based Drug Design, University Park Hotel at MIT, Cambridge, MA, US. Contact Edel O'Regan, Cambridge Healthtech Institute. Tel: +1-(617)-630-1323; e-mail: eoregan@healthtech.com; internet: www.healthtech.com/
28 April-4 May: 36th ESF/Euchem Conference on Stereochemistry, Buergenstock, Switzerland. Contact Prof. E. Peter Kundig, University of Geneva, Dept of Organic Chemistry, 30 quai Ernest Ansermet, Geneva 4, Switzerland: Tel: +41-22-702-6093; fax: +41-22-328-7396; e-mail: Peter.kundig@chiorg.unige.ch; internet: www.unige.ch/sciences/chiorg/
23-24 May: Online Information for the City, London, UK. Contact: Learned Information Europe Ltd, Woodside, Hinksey Hill, Oxford OX1 5BE, UK. Tel: +44-(0)1865-388000; fax: +44-(0)1865-736354; internet: www.online-information-city.co.uk
1-6 July: IUPAC 38th Congress/World Chemistry Congress and 41st IUPAC General Assembly 2001, Brisbane, Australia. Contact Congress Secretariat, IUPAC Congress, PO Box 177, Red Hill, Q 4054, Australia. Tel: +61-7-3368-2644; fax: +61-7-3369-3731; e-mail: wcc2001@ccm.com.au; internet: www.ccm.com.au/wcc/
1-5 July: 1st Symposium of the European Society for Combinatorial Science (EUROCOMBI-1), Eötvös University, Faculty of Science, Budapest, Hungary. Contact Dr Gábor Dibó, Eötvös University, Department of Organic Chemistry, P.O. Box 32, Budapest 112, Hungary H-1518. Tel: +36-1-209-0555 (ext 6336); fax: +36-1-372-2620; e-mail: dibo@szerves.chem.elte.hu; internet: www.eurocombi.com/
11-13 July: Computational Methods in Toxicology and Pharmacology Integrating Internet Resources, Centre de Congrès-Cité Mondiale, Bordeaux, France. Contact Dr. Alain Carpy/ Dr. James Devillers, CMPTI-2001 Symposium Secretary, LPTC-UMR 5472 CNRS, Université de Bordeaux I, 351, Cours de la Libération, F-33405 Talence CEDEX, France. Tel: +33-556-84-89-45; fax: +33-556-84-89-48; e- mail: cmtpi@lptc.u-bordeaux.fr; internet: www.lsmc.u-bordeaux.fr/CMTPI.html
17-18 July: Combinatorial Approaches to Chemistry and Biology III, Cambridge, UK. Contact Elaine Wellingham, RSC Conference Secretariat, Field End House, Bude Close, Nailsea, Bristol, BS 48 2FQ, UK. Tel: +44-(0)1275-85311; fax: +44-(0)1275-85311; e-mail: elaine.wellingham@ukgateway.net
26-31 August: 222th American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting, Chicago, Il, US. Contact American Chemical Society Meetings Department, 1155 Sixteenth Street, N.W., Washington DC 20036, US. Tel: +1-(202)-872-4396; fax: +1-(202)-872-6128; e-mail: natlmtgs@acs.org; internet: www.acs.org/meetings/
10-11 October: Online Information for the City, London, UK. (See May)
4-7 November: Combinatorial Chemistry: Applying the Technology, Dolder Gran Hotel, Zurich, Switzerland. Contact Kate Herrick-Stare, ACS, 1155 16th Street, NW, Washington DC, 20036 US. Tel: +1-800-227-5558/(202)-872-6286; fax: (202)-872-6013; e-mail: acsprosectives@acs.org; internet: www.acs.org/acsprospectives
15-16 November: CombiCat 2001: Combinatorial Catalysis and Catalyst Optimization, Park Hyatt Hotel Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. Contact The Catalyst Group Resources, PO Box 640, Spring House, PA 19477, US. Tel: +1-(215)-628-4447; fax: +1-(215)-628-2267; e-mail: cnf@catalystgrp.com; internet: www.catalystgrp.com/conferences.html
4-6 December: Online Information 2001, Grand Hall, Olympia, London, UK. Contact: Rebekah Hart, Marketing Manager, Learned Information Europe Ltd, Woodside, Hinksey Hill, Oxford OX1 5BE, UK. Tel: +44-(0)1865-388000; fax: +44-(0)1865-736354; e-mail: rebekah_hart@learned.co.uk; internet: www.online-information.co.uk
We are sorry to report the death of Roger Thornley, a long-standing member of the CSA. We extend our sympathy to his family.
Elspeth Hyams, previously Director of the Institute of Information Scientists, is now Editor of The Library Association Record. The new Director of the Institute of Information Scientists is Mary Shearer.
Mick Savage has been appointed to the Management Advisory Board of Structural Bioinformatics.
We are delighted to welcome Dr Andrew Lemon, Project Manager Chemistry Development at IDBS (IDBusiness Solutions Ltd).