We are delighted to announce that the OPSIN web app has become a member of the Chemical Biology Services here at EMBL-EBI and can be accessed at:
OPSIN converts systematic IUPAC names to structures, and is an invaluable service for curators of chemical and biochemical structures or automated chemical text-mining systems. It was originally developed at the University of Cambridge by the Peter Murray-Rust group, with Daniel Lowe continuing to develop it since then. Here's a quote from the History page on the original website:
During the development of OSCAR the need to have a program to convert identified chemical names to connection tables arose. Due to the absence of any open source efforts with broad coverage of organic nomenclature work was started by Peter Murray-Rust and Joe Townsend on such a program. This work was continued by Peter Corbett culminating in the creation of a system broadly similar to the current incarnation (Corbett and Murray-Rust 2006). In 2008 Daniel Lowe took over development of the project as part of his PhD during which time the range of nomenclature supported as been expanded substantially, along with improvements to the parser to cope with the complexity of the grammar of chemical names (Lowe et al. 2011). A comprehensive description of OPSIN, its algorithms and performance (as of mid 2012) is included in the PhD thesis (Lowe 2012). Development of OPSIN is still on-going with more nomenclature continuing to be added (Lowe et al. 2013).
Recently the need arose for migration from the University of Cambridge, and with some coordination from Bobby Glen, we came up with the plan to migrate the service to the EBI. Fortunately, Daniel Lowe is still remaining involved and as improvements arrive in the OPSIN library, these will be picked up by the web app.
We are very happy to provide a home for OPSIN going forward, and hope that users will benefit from the integration with UniChem to help link to other databases containing relevant information. So grab a cup of 1,3,7-trimethyl-3,7-dihydro-1H-purine-2,6-dione and try it out!
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