Deadlines for next year’s Spring ACS National Meeting are fast approaching and we have been making plans for CCDC’s attendance in New Orleans.
The sheer scale of the ACS National Meetings means there’s always far more going on than you have time for and this meeting looks to be no exception. With sessions covering topics that include “Public Databases Serving the Chemistry Community” (Division of Chemical Information), “Drug Discovery: Chemical and Structural Informatics” and “Materials Science” (Division of Computational Chemistry), there looks to be a lot that is relevant to the CCDC’s activities in drug discovery, crystallography and as a provider of scientific data to the community. We’ll be submitting abstracts to some of these sessions and attending as many as we can.
A session I’m more intimately involved in is one on “Linking Bioinformatic and Cheminformatic Data” which I am co-organising with John Overington from EMBL-EBI. The linkage of chemical and biological spaces is central to the successful understanding and modulation of biological systems, with applications from drug design, the engineering of new molecules, and chemical safety. Because of the historical separation of biology and chemistry at an academic level, our sense is that there are relatively few scientists trained at the interface between these two areas, and few database resources to support their research. Our aims for this session are to offer a review of current challenges surrounding this interface, and explore applications and new directions in the linking and mining of bio- and cheminformatic data. If you have a talk that might be relevant to this session then abstracts can be submitted up until 15 Oct 2012 via http://abstracts.acs.org (Session Code CINF001).
