San Diego, CA, September 1, 2005 - gNova Scientific Software is pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of its CHORD software for handling chemical structures in databases. CHORD can easily accommodate databases of several hundred thousand structures on a laptop computer, but also performs excellently on database servers containing many millions of structures. Beyond providing the basic SQL functions needed to handle molecular structures in a database, CHORD also demonstrates its power and flexibility with the inclusion of a suite of functions that can compute fragment-based molecular properties, such as polar surface area, using SQL and tables from within the database. In summary, CHORD allows easy and full integration of experimental and computed chemical properties with chemical structures in a relational database.

CHORD is a SQL extension to PostgreSQL that enables compact storage and efficient searching of molecular structures in a relational database. It uses the OEChem library from OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc. CHORD provides all its features as SQL functions in order to allow easy integration into existing data schemas, as well as creation of new databases of molecular data. Some of its major features are:
· Unique, canonical SMILES
· Substructure and SMARTS searches
· Atom-path fingerprints to speed up searches
· Fragment-key fingerprints to compute structural similarity

CHORD currently runs on Linux systems and requires a separate license from OpenEye. OpenEye Scientific Software, Inc. develops large-scale molecular modeling applications and toolkits geared towards drug discovery and design. PostgreSQL is free, open-source software. It has won much praise, including the 2004 Linux New Media Award For Best Database: “The PostgreSQL team has demonstrated that it is possible to produce a database with the price and ease of administration of MySQL, but with the feature set of Oracle."

About gNova

gNova Scientific Software was founded in 2005 by Dr. TJ O’Donnell as an outgrowth of O’Donnell Associates which was founded in 1987. CHORD is its first commercial product. gNova also offers consulting and contract programming services for scientific research projects, especially those involving databases and web integration.

Contact information:
TJ O’Donnell
press@gnova.com
+1 619 251 8304
http://www.gnova.com/