[ANN] Frowns Chemoinformatics System 0.2 released

[Brian Kelley]

Frowns is a chemoinformatics system written almost entirely in python.

New features in version 0.2
    * Poor depiction of arbitrary molecules! *NEW*
      requires installing GraphViz from AT&T
      http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/
    * Bug fixes in aromaticity perception, non ring-bonds
      are no longer modified.

Frowns currently includes the following features
    * Smiles parser
    * Smarts substructure searching (using the bindings to VFLIB)
    * SD file parser with SD field manipulations
    * Depiction for SD files with coordinates
    * Molecule Fingerprint generation
    * Several forms of Ring Detection available
    * Simple aromaticity perception
    * Full source code


You can download the latest version of frowns at 
http://staffa.wi.mit.edu/people/kelley/
Or you can just skim the tutorial at 
http://staffa.wi.mit.edu/people/kelley/frowns.html

Disclaimer
==========
This software reimplements some of the functionality of the Daylight 
toolkits but it is not meant as a replacement.  Daylight's code has 
higher performance, commercial support, more users, more complete 
testing, documentation, industry backing, and a cool set of people 
working for them.  Plus, you can run PyDaylight located at 
http://www.dalkescientific.com/PyDaylight/ if you don't like the C API.

Given that, you may want to use FROWNS if you;

    * are interested in the implementation details of chemical
      information software
    * want to teach same
    * have ideas that can't be implemented in the Daylight toolkit (new
      types of ring or aromaticity perception, support for different
      operating systems and platforms, etc.)
    * don't have the financial resources for the Daylight tools
    * just plain can't stand the idea of non-free software
    * have nothing better to do in your free time.


Brian Kelley
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research