daylight

Daylight Information systems

This information provider was one of the first companies to offer a "Web" interface to their databases. Here you can see it in action on "sampler" datasets. A number of interfaces are offered in this service, including the World Drug Index, and the "Savant" system.

Start with the WDI database, entering a suitable search term;

The results of a keyword search are displayed on the screen.

Clicking on the "thumbnail" graphic of any molecule found will reveal further properties, one of which is the so-called SMILES string. This is a powerful and popular method of representing molecular structure as a sequence of simple characters. It is also one of the few methods for transferring molecular structure definitions between different programs. To illustrate how this works, select the SMILES string shown below the structure, and "copy" it to the clipboard using the "edit" menu.

Now select the "back" button on the WWW browser, and enter instead the "Savant" database. The query SMILES string can be pasted into the keyword search field. Savant produces a "similarity" search which finds bibliographic references to recent literature relating to the synthesis of compounds either identical to, or similar to the SMILES search query.

Select a compound which may look interesting, and investigate one or two recent literature references to its synthesis;

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