Iosif Vaisman
Laboratory for Molecular Modeling
School of Pharmacy
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel
Hill ,
NC ,
USA
Rapidly growing use of computer networks in chemistry and biology and dramatic increase in the amount of accumulated data on molecular structures led to de facto establishment of a new field - molecular informatics. Molecular informatics deals with representation, storage, retrieval, processing, and exchange of information describing geometries and connectivities in molecules, including biological macromolecules. Currently a significant portion of molecular information is accessible via World Wide Web. However lack of standards for the representation and exchange, centralized versus local storage dilemma, different access mode to the commercial and public databases hinder creation of universal digital libraries for molecular information. Approaches to solving these problems and teaching molecular informatics are discussed.