5th German Conference on Chemoinformatics: 23. CIC-Workshop. November 8-10, 2009, Goslar, Germany

From the 8^th to the 10^th November 2009, the Chemistry-Information-Computers (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) has invited the chemoinformatics and modeling community to Goslar, Germany to participate in the 5th German Conference on Chemoinformatics (GCC 2009). The international symposium addressed a broad range of modern research topics in the field of computers and chemistry. The focus was on recent developments and trends in the fields of Chemoinformatics and Drug Discovery, Chemical Information, Patents and Databases, Molecular Modeling, Computational Material Science and Nanotechnology. In addition, other contributions from the field of Computational Chemistry were welcome.

The conference was opened traditionally with a "Free-Software-Session" on Sunday afternoon right before the official conference opening at 5 pm including three talks about the Open Source projects Bingo, Dingo and OrChem. In parallel the "Chemoinformatics Market Place" took place including software tutorials by Chemical Computing Group, Hemlholtz-Center Munich and the Cambridge Crystallograhic Data Center.

The scientific program was opened by an evening talk giving an overview on the field of Systems Chemistry (Günter von Kiedrowski). In addition, the program included six plenary lectures (Eberhard Voit (USA), Knut Baumann (Germany), Thomas Kostka (Germany), Anthony J. Williams (USA), Kalr-Heinz Baringhaus (Germany), Christoph Sotriffer (Germany)], 17 general lectures as well as 54 poster presentations.

Besides the scientific program a special highlight of the conference were the FIZ-CHEMIE-Berlin 2009 awards on Monday afternoon (Figure 1). The CIC division awards this price each year to the best diploma thesis and the best PhD in the field of Computational Chemistry. The price for the PhD thesis was awarded to Dr. José Batista from the group of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Bajorath, University of Bonn for his dissertation "Analysis of Random Fragment Profiles for the Detaction of Structure-Activity Relationships". The award for the best diploma thesis has gone to Frank Tristram from the group of Dr. Wolfgang Wenzel, Karlsruher Institute of Technology with the title "Modellierubng der Hauptkettenbeweglichkeit in der rechnergestützten Medikamentenentwicklung".

Figure 1

Fiz CHEMIE Berlin Awards 2009: from left to right, Frank Tristram (award for the best diploma thesis), Rene de Planque (Head of FIZ CHEMIE Verlin), Frank Oellien (Chair of the GDCh-CIC division), José Batista (award for the best PhD thesis).