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PubChem

NCI/CADD

Online Demos

Processed PubChem Assay Downloads

Structure Fragmentation

Web Structure Depiction Server

Portable 3D structure Web visualization as embedded PDF

Java- and Plugin-free interactive Web Structure Sketcher

Chemical structure algorithm consistency verification service


The CACTVS Toolkit FAQ

 
General

What is Cactvs?

Cactvs is a general-purpose toolkit for chemical information processing. Its special strengths are a very powerful scripting environment with special Web support features, very good 2D structure layout and rendering functions, a rich set of high-quality I/O modules, extreme extensibility by means of external modules and data definitions, and a powerful lazy computation and data validity maintenance mechanism. By virtue of its extensibility, it can be configured to deal with almost any type of data, in any format.

Is this Cactvs toolkit the same as Cactus from CactusCode ?

No. Cactus (with an u) is an engineering/physics computational toolkit without any relationship to our Cactvs (with a v) chemical information processing toolkit. Unfortunately, both toolkits have a long history reaching back more than a decade each, and a name change is thus problematic for both sides. So please watch the spelling...

How do I cite Cactvs?

Computation and Management of Chemical Properties in CACTVS: An extensible Networked Approach toward Modularity and Flexibility
W. D. Ihlenfeldt, Y. Takahashi, H. Abe, S. Sasaki, J. Chem. Inf. Comp. Sci. 34 (1994), 109-116

Installation

How do I install the standard academic or commercial scripting toolkit versions on Unix/Linux?

First, download a suitable package from our server. The normal distribution format is a gzip-compressed tarfile. Next, make a temporary staging directory (this is not the final installation directory), and unpack the package in this directory. Among the unpacked contents of the package is an installation shell script named installme. Run that script, and answer its questions, for example concerning the installation directories. If you install in /usr/local or similar standard locations, you will probably need root permissions to succeed. Here is a representative example command sequence:

su
mkdir stagedir
cd stagedir
gunzip < ../cactvstools-Linux2.6-SuSE11.0-64-3.353.tar.gz | tar xf -
./installme
cd ..
rm -rf stagedir

Why can't I have an rpm/deb/whatever package? Tar files are so nineties...

Well, if you are a commercial customer, you can request these, built to order for your specific Linux distro and Linux distro installation options. Non-paying customers, please accept that supporting many different package formats is a major hassle. tar files have the advantage that they are the most portable format, and easy to generate.

How do I uninstall the software on Unix/Linux?

Just remove the files. There is no specific uninstaller. The bulk of the Cactvs components are all concentrated in a single subdirectory (usually a subdirectory of /usr/local/lib) which you can remove as a whole. Additionally, delete the cs* wrapper scripts from the executable directory (usually /usr/local/bin), and you are done.

How do I install the standard academic or commercial scripting toolkit versions on Windows?

The Windows package is a standard executable installer. Just download the package and execute it.

How do I uninstall the software on Windows?

Use the normal Windows software manager tool. The package is registered in the standard software list. Depending on your Windows set-up, there may be a lot of questions asked when you uninstall, specifically whether you really want to remove individual font and dll files. This is due to Cactvs not installing these files in the system directories, which seems to confuse Windows to a certain extent. Just park the mouse over the OK button and put something heavy on the Enter key if you see these questions popping up.

Implementation

I heard that Cactvs is implemented in Tcl. That's weird.

And it is wrong. The core system is implemented in efficient and very portable ANSI C. On top of the core, there is a scripting language layer in some packages. Currently, we support Tcl as scripting language, but in the future we may provide other interfaces such as Python. Specialized libraries provided for linking with other systems may or may not contain a script interpreter. A customized package with selected, essential functionalities can be provided as a single compiled C library, without any dependency on a script interpreter.
 
Features

Can Cactvs handle reactions?

Yes, we have full reaction support, including reaction properties and reaction queries. Reaction transformations are possible by means of advanced SMIRKS transform capabilities. Reaction data can be read and written in MDL RXN, RDF, Reaction SMILES, CDX/CDXML and SKC/TGF native molecule editor formats and of course the native Cactvs formats (CBIN,CBS,BDB). We also support reaction depictions in pixel and vector formats.

Can Cactvs handle 3D molecules?

Yes. The only frequently requested component missing is 3D rendering, though even that is not entirely correct, we support 3D output as PovRay renderer data file and VRML. Cactvs can handle 3D atomic coordinates including multiple conformers, and that even for non-element atoms such as Gaussian Bqs. It also supports ISIS-compatible 3D queries, and some limited 3D structure manipulation such as bond rotations. 3D atomic coordinates can be computed for example by an integrated Corina 3D generator module (to be licensed separately from Molecular Networks), or by automatic submission of requests to the chembiogrid.org Web service. On the input front, Cactvs has a rather nice PDB I/O module with full connectivity reconstruction, which measurably outperforms the supposedly hitherto best reader described in J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2007, 47, 1379-1385 on the same test data set. Of course plenty of other 3D file formats are also recognized, read and written.

The InChI or SMILES string computed by some other package does not agree.

Well, in all likelihood the Cactvs version is the correct one, especially if stereochemistry is involved. There were (and are) implementations of these properties in open-source toolkits that have vocal advocates which are severely broken. In case of SMILES, you also need to be aware that there are several canonicalization algorithms. Cactvs implements the algorithm as originally and incompletely published by Daylight. Unfortunately, this is no longer the method used by Daylight in current releases, or by the OpenEye toolkit which strives to be compatible. The official Daylight canonic SMILES algorithm is now proprietary and undocumented. Some older ChemDraw releases have bugs in R/S stereo descriptor generation which were detected by comparison with Cactvs results. However, this does not mean that our software is flawless. Such software does not exist, and if you find a reproducible and understandable problem, we want to hear about it.

Licensing

I am in academia. Do I need a license for the software?

No. The software is free for all academic and educational use. However, this does not guarantee that we will support you in your project. In the absence of a support agreement, support is only given on a case-by-case basis.

I am at a government institution, or a charity, but not at an university. Do I need a license for the software?

Generally, yes, though we may give you a discount or even make available software without charge for public, open-access projects. Support needs to be paid, though.

I have written an interesting application script. May I redistribute it?

Yes, of course, and you may even charge for it if you can find a taker. Any application scripts developed with the software are legally unencumbered and property of the developer (or her institution). However, you must not redistribute our software which executes your application script, and you cannot set up a Cactvs-driven Web site which generates income without a license.

PubChem

Interesting. I did not know that PubChem is built with Cactvs. I heard it was implemented with OpenEye's OEChem library.

Well, that is not wrong, but only part of the story. Both Cactvs and OpenEye software are used, in combination with the in-house NCBI toolkit. Software built with Cactvs is in charge of structure submission pre-parsing, structure input, structure ASN.1 encoding, 2D layout coordinate computation, structure rendering, most property computations, structure unification, the complete structure search system and Web-based structure sketching for queries. The OpenEye toolkit is used for structure standardization, some property computation (names, canonic SMILES), and SD file output. There are applications at NCBI which link to both OpenEye and Xemistry libraries - they can peacefully co-exist.

Are developments for PubChem US government work in the public domain?

Yes, they are, and you can download source code and script code for specific PubChem developments from the PubChem Web site. However, this does not mean that the complete Cactvs system is available. You may or may not learn something from examining the source code fragments from NCBI, but it will not be sufficient give you a working system.

Can Cactvs handle the ASN.1 structure data files of PubChem?

Yes, it can, and to our knowledge it is the only external toolkit which currently has this ability. Using the ASN.1 forms of PubChem records is preferable to the SD files, because the latter are only approximations of the internal PubChem data structure. Cactvs can represent and handle every bit of the PubChem data. If you still prefer using PubChem SD files, you are probably excited to learn that the Cactvs SDF I/O module understands all NCBI extensions for special bond types and annotations, etc.

 

2015-6-10:
Update of general scripting language documentation.

2015-6-10:
Release of academic 3.440 versions of the Cactvs toolkit

 


Free Academic and Evaluation Downloads of the Cactvs Scripting Toolkit


Xemistry GmbH
Hainholzweg 11
D-61462 Königstein
Germany

phone:
+49 6174 201455
fax:
+49 6174 209665

info[at]xemistry.com


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