I just got this message.

I am pleased to announce the release of the program RESP ESP charge Derive version III.5 (or R.E.D. III.5) and its related tools (Ante_R.E.D.-1.5 and X R.E.D. III.5) available @ http://q4md-forcefieldtools.org/RED/. New features available: - Bug corrections and code cleaning, - Update of the Mini-HowTo & Tutorials, - Better handling of Gaussian, GAMESS and Firefly error messages, - Charge value rounding off errors automatically corrected at 10-6 up to 10-2 depending on the user choice, - Handling geometrical constraints in the P2N file format (geometry optimization using the Gaussian program), - Two new scripts for data submission in R.E.DD.B., - New version for the RESP program: version 2.2 with updated documentation. The R.E.D. III.5 tools are distributed under the GNU General Public License after a simple Register & Download procedure. The article describing the R.E.D. tools is available @ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2918240/. News about the latest developments of R.E.D. IV can be found @ http://q4md-forcefieldtools.org/RED/popup/news.php. Best regards, The q4md force field tools team

R.E.D. allows computational biologists involved in AMBER/GAFF, CHARMM, GLYCAM & OPLS force field based biological studies to automatically derive highly effective and reproducible charge values, and to build force field libraries for new molecules and molecular fragments.

A couple of people have contacted me about the news that X11will not part of the standard distribution of the next version of the Mac operating system. X11 is a key UNIX windowing system for a number scientific applications and I can understand the concern. However whilst X11 has been included in the past it should be noted that the distributed version is simply a snapshot of XQuartz, in the future this will be automatically downloaded.

The XQuartz project is an open-source effort to develop a version of the  X.org X Window System that runs on Mac OS X. Together with supporting libraries and applications, it forms the X11.app that Apple has shipped with OS X since version 10.5. It may in fact be better if users download the latest version of XQuartz when needed since they provide regular updates which are unfortunately overwritten when you install a Mac OS update.

Indeed the team have already provided a latest development version that is compatible with Mountain Lion (XQuartz  2.7.1 rc4 - 2012.02.11), if you find any bugs or issues I urge you to report them to the XQuartz team !

I’ve mentioned Silicos-it in the past and I thought I’d highlight them again since they have had a major makeover, the website has moved and the tools have been updated and renamed.

Silicos-it has contributed it’s expertise to the chemoinformatics community by porting its source code into the open source domain. Examples include the spectrophore descriptors, the filtering program filter-it and the pharmacophore tool align-it.

Command-line tools

Filter-it™ is a command-line program for filtering molecules with unwanted properties out of a set of molecules. The program comes with a number of pre-programmed molecular properties that can be used for filtering.

I used the filter-it (previously called Sieve) in a Vortex script, I’ve rewritten the script and the tutorial to account for the name change.

Strip-it™ is a tool to extract molecular scaffolds according predefined rules. These rules are based on the definitions of scaffolds as described by Murcko (J. Med. Chem. 1996, 39, 2887), Pollock (J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2008, 48, 1304) and Schuffenhauer (J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2007, 47, 47).

Align-it™ is a pharmacophore-based tool to align small molecules. The tool is based on the concept of modeling pharmacophoric features by Gaussian 3D volumes instead of the more common point or sphere representations. The smooth nature of these continuous functions has a beneficent effect on the optimisation problem introduced during alignment.

Shape-it™ is a shape-based alignment tool by representing molecules as a set of atomic Gaussians. The software is based on the method described by Grant and Pickup (J. Phys. Chem. 1995, 99, 3503).

Spectrophores are one-dimensional descriptors generated from the property fields surrounding the molecules. This technology allows the accurate description of molecules in terms of their surface properties or fields. Comparison of molecules’ property fields provides a robust structure-independent method of aligning actives from different chemical classes. When applied to molecules such as ligands and drugs, Spectrophores can be used as powerful molecular descriptors in the fields of chemoinformatics, virtual screening, and QSAR modeling. The Spectrophore code was developed by Silicos, and donated to the OpenBabel project in July 2010.

I just thought I’d mention that Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design commissioned some Perspectives on the state and future of the field to commemorate the journal's 25th anniversary and have made this content open access for a limited period.

Special Issue: The next 25 years: Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design

There are some very interesting insights, well worth reading.

Edit

Have a read of Alpha shock by Mark A. Murcko • W. Patrick Walters

Sanjay toggled the telepresence feature on his iPhone (standard since IOS 27.2) and he and Paolo were instantly ‘‘together’’ examining a set of images from the virtual pharmacology study.

OMEGA v2.4.6 has been released. This is a major release with new features including an extension to the MMFF94 force field for three coordinated boron compounds. Designed for use with the large libraries required for computer-aided drug design, OMEGA rapidly generates multi-conformer structure databases.