Avogadro Featured in Journal of Cheminformatics

“Avogadro: An advanced semantic chemical editor, visualization and analysis platform” was recently published in Volume 4 of the Journal of Cheminformatics.  The paper was authored by Marcus D Hanwell, Donald E Curtis, David C Lonie, Tim Vandermeersch, Eva Zurek, and Geoffrey R Hutchinson, and discusses Avogadro 1.0.

Avogadro, the open-source, cross-platform molecule editor and visualization platform is designed for use in computational chemistry, molecular modeling, bioinformatics, materials science, and related research areas. The paper describes the platform’s direct applications in research and education as they relate to chemistry, physics, materials science, and biology, and includes examples on how to extend the tool via plugins.

The Avogadro platform is being developed further as part of the Open Chemistry initiative at Kitware. The initiative is being led by Dr. Marcus Hanwell, the current lead developer of Avogadro, who was recently featured in Nature’s Soapbox Science series “PhDelta: The Road Less Travelled.” In his piece, “From PhD to Software Development,” Dr. Hanwell describes how the lack of useful software tools for use in computational chemistry and physics led him to the world of software development and open source.

Dr. Hanwell is attending the American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia this week, along with Kyle Lutz, where the two will each give talks in the Skolnik Symposium and present a group poster on Open Chemistry.