New ACD/ChemSketch Freeware—Chemical Structures at Your Fingertips

Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) is pleased to announce the latest version of the industry leading ACD/ChemSketch Freeware, a comprehensive chemical drawing package.

Since 1998, ACD/Labs has been offering ACD/ChemSketch Freeware to academic institutions and students, and over a half million chemists worldwide are now benefiting from instant access to ACD/Labs’ chemical drawing tools. Every day another 500 downloads from ACD/Labs website distribute the power of this chemical structure drawing package to desktops around the world. Among many other features, this product offers tautomer recognition, 2D structure cleaning, 3D optimization and viewing, and drawing of polymers, organometallics, and Markush structures. With the added InChI™ chemical nomenclature protocol compatibility, and access to PubChem, ACD/ChemSketch can be used to search online chemical databases directly from the software interface according to structure or substructure searches.

Academic institutes and personal users will be able to access the version 10 freeware version before the commercial version 10.0, is released in November 2006. This pre-release is a token of ACD/Labs' appreciation to educations and researchers, chemistry teachers and students, who use this software on a daily basis. ACD/Labs is proud to offer this tool to the international chemical community in order to contribute to scientific development, promote scientific exchanges, and facilitate the learning of chemistry.

ACD/ChemSketch version 10 freeware contains many important advances and updates. But while ACD/Labs freeware remains as substantial and functional as ever, the commercial version offers even more advanced and unique features, including a searchable dictionary of over 155,000 chemical trivial names with structures, the ability to view and search SDfiles of chemical structures in a new SDF viewing interface component in ChemSketch, and a chemical search engine for locating embedded structures in Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Adobe PDF, and many other file types. A full comparison of the freeware versus commercial version of ACD/ChemSketch can be found at http://www.acdlabs.com/download/chemsk_freeware_vs_commercial.html

Antony Williams, Ph.D., VP, and Chief Science Officer at ACD/Labs, comments, “ACD/ChemSketch is now used in academic labs around the world as one of the foundations of teaching courses related to the applications of computers in chemistry. Based on the collective experiences of hundreds of thousands of chemists, and the feedback they provide to us, we continue to extend the capabilities of our structure drawing interface with the intention of providing an optimal experience for all of our users. Our ongoing efforts to integrate to online resources such as PubChem and eMolecules, and to integrate standards such as InChI, is aligned with our efforts to have ACD/ChemSketch be the primary entry to structure querying and representation for academia.”

Academic users might also be interested in ACD/Labs Academic Site Licensing Program that covers the commercial versions of all ACD/Labs software, including ACD/ChemSketch, ACD/ChemFolder, and ACD/Labs Online (I-Lab). ACD/Labs also donates licenses of freeware ACD/ChemSketch to academic and educational institutions, for further information, visit http://www.acdlabs.com/educators/chsk_licenses.html