Toronto, CANADA —ACD/Labs, a leading cheminformatics company, today (Aug. 23) announced that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Interactive Chemical Safety for Sustainability (iCSS) Chemistry Dashboard, a publicly accessible web application that supports scientists' chemical research, is searchable through ACD/ChemSketch. The integration enables scientists to draw chemicals on their desktop and access high-quality chemical structures, physicochemical properties, and toxicity information via the EPA Chemistry Dashboard. 

"Integration of the ChemSketch drawing package facilitates easy structure-based searching of our Chemistry Dashboard data," said Antony Williams, a computational chemist in the EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology and a project leader for the Chemistry Dashboard. "The Chemistry Dashboard receives thousands of hits per week and that number is growing. We believe that many of the dashboard users will be able to take advantage of ChemSketch's capabilities, as the software has a free version available and it is already being used by more than a million scientists." 

The Chemistry Dashboard, launched earlier this year, is part of a suite of dashboards developed by the EPA to help environmental chemists, computational toxicologists, and other researchers use new types of data to evaluate the potential health effects of chemicals. Within the Chemistry Dashboard, scientists can access chemical structures, experimental and predicted physiochemical properties and toxicity data, and additional links to relevant websites and applications. The dashboard also maps curated physiochemical property data associated with chemical substances to their corresponding chemical structures. Users may also filter results by chemical name, mass or molecular formula, or by chemical identifiers. 

ChemSketch gives scientists the ability to draw chemical structures including organics, organometallics, polymers, and Markush structures. ChemSketch also provides calculation of molecular properties (e.g., molecular weight, density, molar refractivity, etc.), 2D and 3D structure cleaning and viewing, functionality for naming structures (fewer than 50 atoms and 3 rings), and prediction of logP.  

"The EPA works diligently to ensure the Chemistry Dashboard provides public access to hundreds of thousands of chemicals with associated high-quality data, which supports chemical safety testing and computational toxicology research," said Daria Thorp, president and CEO of ACD/Labs. "The EPA's National Center for Computational Toxicology work on the Chemistry Dashboard and other initiatives represent a groundbreaking approach to how chemicals are evaluated for their potential health effects, and we are pleased to collaborate with them to integrate the Chemistry Dashboard with ChemSketch." 

Add the EPA iCSS search functionality to your ACD/ChemSketch installation here.