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When molecules go viral

Chemistry is HardImage by Shevralay via Flickr

What happens when a compound goes viral? I am sure you’ve thought about this many times. For the 2 of you not on FriendFeed, I point you to a post by Antony Williams on the Chemspider blog where he announces embeddable chemical structures.

Picking up on an idea from Cameron Neylon (As per the comments before, Chemspider has had this in the works for a while, but the discussion accelerated public release), Chemspider now allows you to embed chemical structures in blog posts or wherever you choose to. Clicking on the embedded figure takes you to the Chemspider page. In a world where an increasing amount of information is going online, features like this are worth their weight in gold and only serves to make Chemspider that much more valuable as a chemical resource.

Here’s a random molecule: [2-oxo-1-phenyl-2-(3,3,5-trimethylcyclohexoxy)ethyl] pyridine-3-c​arboxylate

Hopefully we will continue to see these approaches that enable and encourage re-use. It would be nice if you didn’t have be login. Perhaps the information content could change depending on the account status

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  • Cameron/Antony, thanks for the clarification
  • Thanks for the recognition...what Cameron wants is actually different...he wants embedded spectral data and we are working on it. We've had embeddable structures for months but Cameron's request prompted me to release the request to test to a larger audience.

    We will likely move the feature so that no login is required once we get some more feedback from the users
  • neuraxon77
    Awesome idea. Unfortunately the rendered image didn't appear in my feed.
  • I should point out that Tony was working on this before I asked. I think I just prompted him into going public a little earlier. Great to see though.
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