GCC2011 – 25 years of computational chemistry meetings

25 years ago members of the Chemistry-InformationComputers (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) [1] realized that the usage of computers will play a major role in the processing of chemical information and that computational methods will have a large impact on chemical research approaches. At that time, Computational Chemistry was not yet established as a research field. Thus, scientists working in this area were typically chemists from all realms of chemistry who happened to have an interest in computers. To address the initial issues in the field of Computational Chemistry in a collaborative manner, the workshop “Software-Entwicklung in der Chemie” (software development in chemistry) — later renamed the CIC-Workshop — was established. The foundations were laid in this annual workshop and many projects and scientific outcomes originated from it in the years thereafter. While the initial workshops focused on the implementation of chemical databases, other topics, such as structure elucidation, structure representation and data mining, gained importance over the following years. The scientific network became more and more international over the intervening years, so much so that the CIC board decided in 2005 to change the, up to that point, German workshop into an international conference. The 7 German Conference on Chemoinformatics (GCC2011) was held from the 6 to the 8 of November 2011 in Goslar, Germany. The CIC division invited the chemoinformatics and molecular modeling community to the GCC2011 to celebrate the 25 anniversary of the CIC-workshop. The conference focused on recent developments and trends in the fields of Chemoinformatics and Drug Discovery Chemical Information, Patents and Databases Molecular Modeling Computational Materials Science and Nanotechnology As always, contributions from other research areas of Computational Chemistry were also welcome. Despite the recent major changes in the pharmaceutical industry and the resulting decrease in research, the number of participants was comparable to the German Conference on Chemoinformatics in 2010. The international character of the conference was even more pronounced than in the preceding years due to the 149 participants from 18 countries (Figure 1, 2). Following the tradition, the conference was opened up by the “Free-Software-Session” and the “Chemoinformatics Market Place” on Sunday afternoon. Four Open Source projects — Travis, Knime, ParadocS and DebiChem — were presented in the “Free-Software-Session” and three preconference workshops were given by the companies Chemical Computing Group, Tripos and Xemistry. The first day of the conference was concluded by dinner and an evening lecture by Johann Gasteiger (“25 Years of CIC – Achievements and Future Goals”) both of which took place in the ore mine of Rammelsberg. The program of the following two days included plenary lectures from six well-known keynote speakers from industry and academia (Oliver Kohlbacher, University of Tübingen, Germany; Colin Groom, CCDC, Cambridge, UK; Eva Rauls, University of Paderborn, Germany; Colin Batchelor, RCS, Cambridge, UK; Herbert Köppen, Boehringer Ingelheim, Germany and Xavier Barril, University of Barcelona, Spain), as well as 17 lectures and 71 poster presentations. A special highlight of the conference was the FIZCHEMIE-Berlin awards (Figure 3). The CIC division awards this prize every year to the best diploma thesis and the best PhD thesis in the field of Computational * Correspondence: [email protected] GDCh-CIC Division Chair, Intervet Innovation GmbH – MSD Animal Health, Zur Propstei, 55270 Schwabenheim, Germany Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Oellien et al. Journal of Cheminformatics 2012, 4(Suppl 1):A1 http://www.jcheminf.com/content/4/S1/A1