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Concept
International Chemical Identifier
Summary
The International Chemical Identifier (InChI ˈɪntʃiː or ˈɪŋkiː ) is a textual identifier for chemical substances, designed to provide a standard way to encode molecular information and to facilitate the search for such information in databases and on the web. Initially developed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2000 to 2005, the format and algorithms are non-proprietary. Since May 2009, it has been developed by the InChI Trust, a nonprofit charity from the United Kingdom which works to implement and promote the use of InChI.
The identifiers describe chemical substances in terms of layers of information — the atoms and their bond connectivity, tautomeric information, isotope information, stereochemistry, and electronic charge information.
Not all layers have to be provided; for instance, the tautomer layer can be omitted if that type of information is not relevant to the particular application. The InChI algorithm converts input structural information into a unique InChI identifier in a three-step process: normalization (to remove redundant information), canonicalization (to generate a unique number label for each atom), and serialization (to give a string of characters).
InChIs differ from the widely used CAS registry numbers in three respects: firstly, they are freely usable and non-proprietary; secondly, they can be computed from structural information and do not have to be assigned by some organization; and thirdly, most of the information in an InChI is human readable (with practice). InChIs can thus be seen as akin to a general and extremely formalized version of IUPAC names. They can express more information than the simpler SMILES notation and, in contrast to SMILES strings, every structure has a unique InChI string, which is important in database applications. Information about the 3-dimensional coordinates of atoms is not represented in InChI; for this purpose a format such as can be used.
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