Computational methods for the accurate prediction of protein folding based on amino acid sequences have been researched for decades. The field has been significantly advanced in recent years by deep learning-based approaches, like AlphaFold, RoseTTAFold, or ColabFold. Although these can be used by the scientific community in various, mostly free and open ways, they are not yet widely used by bench scientists in relevant fields such as protein biochemistry or molecular biology, who are often not familiar with software tools such as scripting notebooks, command-line interfaces or cloud computing. In addition, visual inspection functionalities like protein structure displays, structure alignments, and specific protein hotspot analyses are required as a second step to interpret and apply the predicted structures in ongoing research studies. PySSA (Python rich client for visual protein Sequence to Structure Analysis) is an open Graphical User Interface (GUI) application combining the protein sequence to structure prediction capabilities of ColabFold with the open-source variant of the molecular structure visualisation and analysis system PyMOL to make both available to the scientific end-user. PySSA enables the creation of managed and shareable projects with defined protein structure prediction and corresponding alignment workflows that can be conveniently performed by scientists without specialised computer skills or programming knowledge on their local computers. Thus, PySSA can help make protein structure prediction more accessible for end-users in protein chemistry and molecular biology as well as be used for educational purposes. It is openly available on GitHub, alongside a custom graphical installer executable for the Windows operating system: https://github.com/urban233/PySSA/wiki/Installation-for-Windows-Operating-System. To demonstrate the capabilities of PySSA, its usage in a protein mutation study on the protein drug Bone Morphogenetic Protein 2 (BMP2) is described: the structure prediction results indicate that the previously reported BMP2-2Hep-7M mutant, which is intended to be less prone to aggregation, does not exhibit significant spatial rearrangements of amino acid residues interacting with the receptor.

Recent years have seen a sharp increase in the development of deep learning and artificial intelligence-based molecular informatics. There has been a growing interest in applying deep learning to several subfields, including the digital transformation of synthetic chemistry, extraction of chemical information from the scientific literature, and AI in natural product-based drug discovery. The application of AI to molecular informatics is still constrained by the fact that most of the data used for training and testing deep learning models are not available as FAIR and open data. As open science practices continue to grow in popularity, initiatives which support FAIR and open data as well as open-source software have emerged. It is becoming increasingly important for researchers in the field of molecular informatics to embrace open science and to submit data and software in open repositories. With the advent of open-source deep learning frameworks and cloud computing platforms, academic researchers are now able to deploy and test their own deep learning models with ease. With the development of new and faster hardware for deep learning and the increasing number of initiatives towards digital research data management infrastructures, as well as a culture promoting open data, open source, and open science, AI-driven molecular informatics will continue to grow. This review examines the current state of open data and open algorithms in molecular informatics, as well as ways in which they could be improved in future.

The concept of molecular scaffolds as defining core structures of organic molecules is utilised in many areas of chemistry and cheminformatics, e.g. drug design, chemical classification, or the analysis of high-throughput screening data. Here, we present Scaffold Generator, a comprehensive open library for the generation, handling, and display of molecular scaffolds, scaffold trees and networks. The new library is based on the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) and highly customisable through multiple settings, e.g. five different structural framework definitions are available. For display of scaffold hierarchies, the open GraphStream Java library is utilised. Performance snapshots with natural products (NP) from the COCONUT (COlleCtion of Open Natural prodUcTs) database and drug molecules from DrugBank are reported. The generation of a scaffold network from more than 450,000 NP can be achieved within a single day.

The concept of molecular scaffolds as defining core structures of organic molecules is utilised in many areas of chemistry and cheminformatics, e.g. drug design, chemical classification, or the analysis of high-throughput screening data. Here, we present Scaffold Generator, a comprehensive open library for the generation, handling, and display of molecular scaffolds, scaffold trees and networks. The new library is based on the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) and highly customisable through multiple settings, e.g. five different structural framework definitions are available. For display of scaffold hierarchies, the open GraphStream Java library is utilised. Performance snapshots with natural products (NP) from the COCONUT database and drug molecules from DrugBank are reported. The generation of a scaffold network from more than 450,000 NP can be achieved within a single day.