MONA - Interactive manipulation of molecule collections

Working with small-molecule datasets is a routine task for cheminformaticians and chemists. The analysis and comparison of vendor catalogues and the compilation of promising candidates as starting points for screening campaigns are but a few very common applications. The workflows applied for this purpose usually consist of multiple basic cheminformatics tasks such as checking for duplicates or filtering by physico-chemical properties. Pipelining tools allow to create and change such workflows without much effort, but usually do not support interventions once the pipeline has been started. In many contexts, however, the best suited workflow is not known in advance, thus making it necessary to take the results of the previous steps into consideration before proceeding. To support intuition-driven processing of compound collections, we developed MONA, an interactive tool that has been designed to prepare and visualize large small-molecule datasets. Using an SQL database common cheminformatics tasks such as analysis and filtering can be performed interactively with various methods for visual support. Great care was taken in creating a simple, intuitive user interface which can be instantly used without any setup steps. MONA combines the interactivity of molecule database systems with the simplicity of pipelining tools, thus enabling the case-to-case application of chemistry expert knowledge. The current version is available free of charge for academic use and can be downloaded at http://www.zbh.uni-hamburg.de/mona.