Blog Events

​This is my first blog entry for the CCDC. I am proud to say that it is a first from the US office – Paul’s previous blog entry doesn’t count as he transferred over from our Cambridge office in the UK. In the six months I have been with the CCDC I have learned a lot, and found it an impressive place to work. More importantly, I’ve now had the chance to interact with quite a few of our US customers. I am continually amazed at how well-respected the organization is by our customers, depositors and contributors. I hope that we can make sure this continues to be the case.

The ramping up of our North American operation coincides with the UNESCO International Year of Crystallography and the 23rd IUCr Congress being in Montreal this year (where it was last held in 1957!). There will be several CCDC staff members there, from both the US and UK, so if you’re attending please come and see the CCDC exhibition stand at booth 213/215!

​The European Crystallographic Meeting (ECM-28) at Warwick University in August this year marked my personal return to the world of crystallographic conferences after a gap of some eleven years. I recently returned to work at the CCDC, having left in 2002, and spent the intervening 11 years working in the drug discovery software industry which, although related and relevant, is quite a different community.

​Last weekend CCDC organised some guided walks round our Chemicals from Plants Trail at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, as part of Cambridge Science Festival.  The 2013 Festival consisted of over 200 events overseen by Guest Director Benedict Cumberbatch. 

Deadlines for next year’s Spring ACS National Meeting are fast approaching and we have been making plans for CCDC’s attendance in New Orleans.

The sheer scale of the ACS National Meetings means there’s always far more going on than you have time for and this meeting looks to be no exception. With sessions covering topics that include “Public Databases Serving the Chemistry Community” (Division of Chemical Information), “Drug Discovery: Chemical and Structural Informatics” and “Materials Science” (Division of Computational Chemistry), there looks to be a lot that is relevant to the CCDC’s activities in drug discovery, crystallography and as a provider of scientific data to the community. We’ll be submitting abstracts to some of these sessions and attending as many as we can.

A session I’m more intimately involved in is one on “Linking Bioinformatic and Cheminformatic Data” which I am co-organising with John Overington from EMBL-EBI. The linkage of chemical and biological spaces is central to the successful understanding and modulation of biological systems, with applications from drug design, the engineering of new molecules, and chemical safety. Because of the historical separation of biology and chemistry at an academic level, our sense is that there are relatively few scientists trained at the interface between these two areas, and few database resources to support their research. Our aims for this session are to offer a review of current challenges surrounding this interface, and explore applications and new directions in the linking and mining of bio- and cheminformatic data. If you have a talk that might be relevant to this session then abstracts can be submitted up until 15 Oct 2012 via http://abstracts.acs.org (Session Code CINF001).

I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the new and improved CCDC website. Given the big changes that have been implemented (both in terms of the layout and with the technology behind the scenes) we’ve decided to first launch the new site as this ‘beta-release’. This should give you a chance to get used to the updated look, while still giving you the backup of the site you’ve become familiar with over the past few years. Importantly for us, it also allows you to give us your views and feedback as we continue to develop the site. If you have a few spare minutes, please take a look around the new site and fill in our feedback form (there should be a link to the form from every page), we really are keen to hear what you think.