The rebirth of line notations

• With the increasing need to manipulate and store large numbers of chemical structures, line notations offer great advantages. In general they occupy ~1% of the disc space, required by a connection table.

• The newer line notations, with a linguistic structure such as SMILES and SMARTS can make use of the character handling capabilities of modern computers.

• Machine readable/writable

  • Parse from left to right in a single pass

• Human understandable

• Have the capacity to code chemical concepts

• Can describe reactions and can be used to carry out in silico chemistry

• Can be stored in regular RDBS’s or documents.

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