Macs in Chemistry

Insanely Great Science

Scripting Vortex 12

In the previous tutorial we made use of the Virtual Computational Chemistry Laboratory web service to calculate aLogP and LogS, both these results were returned in a simple text format. More recently there has been an increased use of JSON format for data exchange.

JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a text-based open standard designed for easy human-readable data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing simple data structures and associative arrays, called objects. Despite its relationship to JavaScript, it is language-independent, with parsers available for many languages including including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python.

Molinspiration provide a number of cheminformatics tools but also provide a RESTful web service these web services can be used to calculate a range of molecular properties and bioactivity predictions.

The output from both web services is available either as a JSON string or plain text, the web service can be accessed by submitting a URL

Full details of the script are here.

vortex1