Chemical information is the basis of chemical research, and several ways to use chemical information have been developed. Chemists have accumulated a large amount of data and knowledge of chemistry in books and literature, have established rules for nomenclature and representation of chemical structures and reactions, and have utilized the chemical information for their research from the beginning of chemistry. Efforts to expand the use of computers have given rise to a computer-centric research field that has in turn been developing many methodologies for computer-processing of chemical information. These include such as line and canonical notations of chemical structures, construction of databases, and modeling data structures using statistics and neural network methods. Many efficient ways for human to access chemical information via computer have also been developed such as a molecular model viewer on a graphics display.

Our laboratory’s research is devoted to these topics of chemoinformatics, which are closely related to bioscience.