Faculty, Students at Rice University Draw Freely, Thanks to Donated Software License

Rice University is the most recent recipient of a site license for Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs’) ACD/ChemSketch version 10.0 Freeware allowing staff and students of the university access to an advanced chemical tool for drawing and naming chemical structures.

When professors in the Faculty of Bioengineering at Rice University in Houston Texas found they needed a software package to help draw accurate chemical structures to place in publications and grant proposals for their work on glycosaminoglycans, they contacted ACD/Labs. The result was the donation of a site license of ACD/Labs’ chemical drawing tool ACD/ChemSketch Freeware version 10.0. “We use ChemSketch to draw structures to add detail to our publications and grant applications.” said Professor Jane Grande-Allen, Assistant Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. “For example, we can now show fine structural differences in glycosaminoglycan sulfation that affect molecular function, and the ability to illustrate these differences really adds to a grant application.”

With the University’s site license, students as well as faculty, and research staff now have access to the freeware version of ACD/ChemSketch 10.0. Grande-Allen adds, “My students appreciate ACD/ChemSketch not only because it is free for academic use, but also because of the added features such as tools for tautomer prediction, 2D structure cleaning, and 3D viewing.”

ACD/ChemSketch is also available in a full commercial version which, like the freeware version is the interface to the entire range of ACD/Labs’ analytical products. In addition, the commercial version includes a dictionary of more than 156,000 trivial, common, and trade names with their corresponding structures, and allows users to search Microsoft Word or Adobe PDF reports, SDfiles, molfiles, and CambridgeSoft ChemDraw files by chemical structure, substructure, or structure similarity.