In March, we had another opportunity to showcase NFDI4Chem’s achievements on the big stage of ACS. The ACS meetings usually attract more than 15,000 people from all over the world and include thousands of presentations in various thematic sessions. This year’s spring meeting – held in San Diego, California, from March 23 to 27 – wasn’t any different and provided plenty of networking possibilities.
Chandu Nainala and Kohulan Rajan from the Jena Team contributed oral presentations on ‘Open databases and repositories: Powering AI advancements in chemistry’ and ‘Open AI tools for chemical data mining’ in the session ‘Cheminformatics in the Open Science Era: From Data Science to Artificial Intelligence’. Jochen Ortmeyer (RWTH Aachen) gave an invited talk on ‘Teaching research data management in chemistry: How to implement data literacy in chemistry curricular and beyond’ as part of a session on ‘Cheminformatics Education Resources: Cheminformatics Integration’.
Furthermore, two posters were presented in the poster session ‘Chemical Information Across the Chemistry Enterprise’:
- Cheminformatics microservice: An open-source solution facilitating access to diverse cheminformatics toolkits (Kohulan Rajan)
- COCONUT 2.0: A comprehensive improved open database for Natural Products Research (Chandu Nainala)
In addition to the fruitful discussions that followed our presentations, we engaged in many conversations during receptions, breaks and other social gatherings for networking with international colleagues. Notably, these exchanges have already led to meaningful contributions to nmrXiv, supporting the advancement of FAIR NMR data, and the continued development of the COCONUT database, enhancing its role as a vital open resource for natural products research. Even new ideas for cooperation were born – stay tuned!
