SmilesDrawer: Parsing and Drawing SMILES-Encoded Molecular Structures Using Client-Side JavaScript

• Published in: Journal of chemical information and modeling Vol. 58; no. 1; pp. 1 - 7
• Main Authors: Probst, Daniel, Reymond, Jean-Louis
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 22-01-2018
• Subjects: Buckminsterfullerene; Building codes; Coding; Computer memory; Computer-Aided Design; Fullerenes; Internet; Java; Molecular Structure; Molecules; Organic Chemicals - chemistry; Organic chemistry; Programming Languages; Software; Stereoisomerism; User-Computer Interface; Websites
• ISSN: 1549-9596; 1549-960X
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.7b00425

Here we present SmilesDrawer, a dependency-free JavaScript component capable of both parsing and drawing SMILES-encoded molecular structures client-side, developed to be easily integrated into web projects and to display organic molecules in large numbers and fast succession. SmilesDrawer can draw structurally and stereochemically complex structures such as maitotoxin and C60 without using templates, yet has an exceptionally small computational footprint and low memory usage without the requirement for loading images or any other form of client–server communication, making it easy to integrate even in secure (intranet, firewalled) or offline applications. These features allow the rendering of thousands of molecular structure drawings on a single web page within seconds on a wide range of hardware supporting modern browsers. The source code as well as the most recent build of SmilesDrawer is available on Github (http://doc.gdb.tools/smilesDrawer/). Both yarn and npm packages are also available.