The new ChemBioOffice 11.0 package by CambridgeSoft offers a very flexible approach

ChemBioOffice

CambridgeSoft 

Reviewed by Tama Gunda, University of Debrecen, Hungary

The new ChemBioOffice 11.0 package by CambridgeSoft offers a very flexible approach to both the demands of individual scientists and the complex information management needs of an enterprise level chemical and biological company. The fundamental modules ChemBioDraw, ChemBio3D and ChemFinder have been extended in several ways, and integration with each other or with other modules has been further developed. 

The incorporation of BioDraw tools into ChemBioOffice proved a very fortunate extension of ChemDraw. As a scientist and teacher of pharmaceutical chemistry, the reviewer often faces the problem of welding biochemistry or molecular biology to conventional organic chemistry. The BioDraw tools are simple, yet very powerful drawing tools enabling the creation of complex biological objects such as DNA helices, membranes, receptors, transmembrane proteins, etc. 

The molecular modeling application ChemBio3D 11.0 contains several improvements - for example the MMFF94 force field has been added. Its seamless integration with ChemBioDraw makes it exceptionally easy to draw a structure in 2D and then convert it on-the-fly to a full 3D structure. 

Three knowledge management applications are included in the Ultra version: 

E-Notebook 11.0 is more than a traditional laboratory notebook and more than a passive repository of diverse types of documents, spectra and analytical data in electronic formats - it manages, organises and exchanges data on workgroup or enterprise level, enabling more effective collaboration.  

BioAssay 11.0 and BioViz 11.0 are for helping drug research and lead optimisation experiments. They combine biological experimental data with chemical structures, visualise and manage the data to provide automatic statistical analysis.  

Inventory 11.0 is a powerful inventory application for registering and managing chemical and biological reagents. All of these applications are tightly integrated with each other and ChemFinder 11.0 and have well-designed user interfaces, which allow even the novice user to set up common tasks quite easily. 

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