ACCESS | Asia 's Newspaper on Electronic Information Product & Service

September 2001 No.38

SciFinder 2001 gives researchers new tools for exploring biotechnology and drug discovery

In its new SciFinder 2001 release, the award-winning SciFinder desktop research tool breaks new ground for the exploration of multidisciplinary scientific information. Researchers in biotechnology can explore literature in their subject area more easily using the BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) algorithm, incorporated into SciFinder. At the same time, SciFinder 2001 introduces additional substance information and a variety of new and improved features for drug discovery and keeping scientists up to date with newly published information specific to their interests. The new features, planned for October, were announced by CAS during the American Chemical Society national meeting held this week in Chicago.

With the addition of BLAST capability, SciFinder will enable scientists to explore publicly disclosed DNA or protein sequences. Using this new feature in tandem with multidisciplinary databases from CAS and MEDLINE, researchers can move directly from identifying a sequence similar to a queried sequence to viewing associated published research and patents.

"SciFinder is now becoming an even stronger, more versatile tool for exploring chemical and biological information published around the world," said CAS Marketing Director, Suzan A. Brown. "Our new BLAST Explore will be a welcome addition, but we are also making substantial extensions to database content. This includes adding calculated properties, another 10 years of reaction information, and citation searching, which, along with the other innovations, will help researchers remain in the vanguard of the biomedical and chemical revolution."

Eight calculated property values added

In addition to BLAST searching SciFinder 2001 will introduce a variety of features for more effective exploration of research information:

	The popular Keep Me Posted capability, which alerts SciFinder users to the latest reported research on the topics they define, will permit users to specify chemical structures of interest
	Reaction information back to 1975 will be added for more than 750,000 single- and multi-step reactions, through an agreement with the German software company, InfoChem GmbH. CAS Registry Numbers will be assigned to reaction participants and each reaction will be linked to its corresponding CAplus document record.

	For over 3 million substance records in the CAS Registry, CAS is adding eight calculated property values: number of hydrogen donors, number of hydrogen acceptors, number of rotatable bonds, molecular weight, logD, logP, pKa, and solubility in water. These calculated properties are provided through software developed by ACD and will enable researchers to quickly and easily focus on the more "drug-like" molecules identified in SciFinder structure explores.
	Citation searching will be available in SciFinder; for a document or set of documents identified through SciFinder, researchers will be able to view either the references cited in those documents (cited documents) or identify the sources that cite the documents in the answer set (citing documents).
	In cooperation with Spotfire, Inc., CAS will couple SciFinder's advanced chemical substance Explore capabilities with Spotfire DecisionSite's interactive visualisation and information analysis tools, giving customers of both services new avenues for drug discovery.

SciFinder was created in 1995 with the vision of providing scientists easy, point-and-click access to chemical information. The new intelligent research tool - a client-server product for the desktop - was an immediate hit with scientists, assisting them and other researchers worldwide with access to the multidisciplinary CAS databases. Today, tens of thousands of scientists at pharmaceutical, biotech, and chemical companies around the world use SciFinder regularly to explore research topics, browse scientific journals and stay up-to-date on recent scientific developments.