OpenBabel

OpenBabel is free software, a chemical expert system mainly used for converting chemical file formats. Due to the strong relationship to informatics this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling. It is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS. It is distributed under the GNU GPL.

The project's stated goal is: "Open Babel is a community-driven scientific project assisting both users and developers as a cross-platform program and library designed to support molecular modeling, chemistry, and many related areas, including interconversion of file formats and data."

Additional recommended knowledge

Essential Laboratory Skills Guide

Safe Weighing Range Ensures Accurate Results

Daily Visual Balance Check

History

OpenBabel and JOELib were derived from the OELib Cheminformatics library. In turn, OELib was based on ideas in the original chemistry program Babel and an unreleased object-oriented library called "OBabel."

Major features

• chemical expert system
• interconversion of many chemical file formats
• substructure search (based on SMARTS)
• fingerprint calculation
• Python wrapper
• Perl wrapper

See also

• Ghemical - molecular mechanics program based on OpenBabel
• JOELib - Java version of OpenBabel/OELib
• XDrawChem - 2D drawing program based on OpenBabel

References

• The Blue Obelisk-Interoperability in Chemical Informatics, Rajarshi Guha, Michael T. Howard, Geoffrey R. Hutchison, Peter Murray-Rust, Henry Rzepa, Christoph Steinbeck, Jörg K. Wegner, and Egon L. Willighagen, J. Chem. Inf. Model.; 2006; doi:10.1021/ci050400b