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It's probably the best known chemical structure drawing program in the world. So when ChemDraw receives a major new release, it needs to impress a huge user base. And with version 6, we think it should do just that. Stereochemistry, on-line supplier information and improved NMR features are just the start.
Stereochemistry is of major importance in the pharmaceutical sector and beyond. It's going to excite a lot of chemists therefore that Cambridgesoft, the developer of the industry-leading chemical drawing software Chemdraw, has announced that amongst a number of new developments to the program is the ability to make it more capable in the world of diastereomers and enantiomers.
Users of Chemdraw will now find that a simple toggle switch in the Tools menu activates a feature called 'show stereochemistry'. This automatically assigns stereochemistry to all asymmetric tetrahedral atoms and double bonds according to Cahn-Ingold-Prelog priority rules. The brilliant 'Name=Struct' capability introduced in the previous version of Chemdraw can also recognise and produce stereochemical compounds. So as with other structures, Chemdraw can automatically put names to structures which you might draw or import, and can automatically draw the structures given the names.
Even for chemists not so involved with stereochemistry, Chemdraw 6 could revolutionise the way you work, thanks to another extraordinary feature, a link to Chemstore.com on the internet. After having created compounds on screen, new menu options enable you to link directly to this web site and see who supplies the compound, check the prices and more. This is a use of Chemdraw's customisable menu extension technology, which is interesting corporate users wishing to link to internal databases.
Also introduced with Chemdraw 6 are enhancements to the popular ChemNMR feature. Previous releases enabled the system to predict Carbon 13 and Proton NMR numerical shift values, and provided line spectra drawings to complement the tabular values. Now the spectral lines show correlations with the atoms of the Chemdraw structure when selected. Passing the cursor over a particular peak will highlight the corresponding atoms responsible for that peak. And if you've imported spectra into ChemDraw, manual peak-atom assignments can be made with ease.
Of course, no major release of a product like ChemDraw would be complete without a number of user-interface and general capability enhancements requested by users. Amongst those in ChemDraw 6 are context-sensitive (right-click) menus which make drawing much faster. There's also the ability to move into multiple page documents, or large ones using pages as tiles, so poster production is now possible whether you have access to a large format printer or not.
ChemDraw can now read Bruker JCAMP files, and in addition to SMILES files, it can copy and paste SMIRKS strings, the subset designed for chemical reactions. It has enhanced compatibility with MDL ISIS SKC files, which can be read cross-platform, with R groups, chiral flags and anonymous labels preserved.
Finally for this report, what are the red boxes which appear on screen from time to time? This is one of our favourite new features, interactive warnings to possible errors. For example, if a bond hadn't been attached properly (but appeared to be), ChemDraw will guess that you've missed this and highlight it accordingly. Or perhaps there's incorrect valency. The red box highlights the questionable part of the drawing, and the context-sensitive menus can be used to explain the warning fully. Another example of why ChemDraw looks set to remain as the world's number one chemical drawing program.
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