ChemDraw™ is a

molecule editor A notable molecule editor is a computer program for creating and modifying representations of chemical structures. Molecule editors can manipulate chemical structure representations in either a simulated two-dimensional space or three-dimensional ...

and communication suite, for the management, reporting, and presentation of chemistry research and discoveries. ChemDraw was originally conceived in 1985 by Selena "Sally" Evans, her husband David A. Evans, and Stewart Rubenstein. In July 1985, ChemDraw was demonstrated at the Gordon Research Conference on Reactions & Processes in New Hampshire, USA, an event remembered by many chemists, such was the breakthrough provided by the software. Later that same year, Stewart’s younger brother, Michael, began developing Chem3D, a companion program to ChemDraw that allows users to draw three-dimensional chemical structures. ChemDraw’s popularity led to the launch of cheminformatics company Cambridge Scientific Computing, later renamed CambridgeSoft, to further develop the program. CambridgeSoft was sold to

PerkinElmer PerkinElmer, Inc., previously styled Perkin-Elmer, is an American global corporation that was founded in 1937 and originally focused on precision optics. Over the years it went into and out of several different businesses via acquisitions and di ...

in 2011. In 2022, PerkinElmer split their businesses, and the Life Science and Diagnostics divisions became

Revvity Revvity, Inc. is an American company in the life sciences and diagnostics business that is focused on selling to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, especially in relation to approaches making use of new cell therapy or gene therapy ...

, Inc. Today, ChemDraw is developed by , the informatics division of Revvity. ChemDraw is augmented by a number of desktop applications such as Chem3D (3D modelling) ChemFinder (dataset analysis), and ChemDraw for Excel. In 2024, ChemDraw+, a web-based application, was launched as part of the new product Signals ChemDraw, with full integration with other Revvity Signals solutions.

Features of ChemDraw

ChemDraw is available in three different offerings: ChemDraw Prime, which contains the core functionalities, ChemDraw Professional, and Signals™ ChemDraw: ChemDraw Prime * Desktop application * Efficient chemical drawing with hot-keys and shortcuts *

Structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

and reaction clean-up * Apply styling according to publisher policies * Property predictions (

pKa In chemistry, an acid dissociation constant (also known as acidity constant, or acid-ionization constant; denoted ) is a quantitative measure of the strength of an acid in solution. It is the equilibrium constant for a chemical reaction :H ...

, logP, logS, etc) ChemDraw Professional * Desktop application *

Name A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A person ...

-to-

structure A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as ...

and

-to-

name A name is a term used for identification by an external observer. They can identify a class or category of things, or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. The entity identified by a name is called its referent. A person ...

conversion *

highlighting for atoms, bonds, and rings * ¹H and ¹³C

NMR Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a physical phenomenon in which atomic nucleus, nuclei in a strong constant magnetic field are disturbed by a weak oscillating magnetic field (in the near and far field, near field) and respond by producing ...

spectrum prediction * Representation of peptides and oligonucleotides following the HELM standard * Integration with , , ,

Google scholar Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of Academic publishing, scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in Beta release, beta in November 2004, th ...

patents A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

, and other scientific data sources Signals ChemDraw *

SaaS Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike oth ...

(Software as a Service) application available from a secured cloud-based environment * Management and sharing of collections of chemical drawings * Capability to find and reuse chemical drawings hidden in work documents * On-line management of licenses and user access rights * Automatic deployment of latest release

File format

The native file formats for ChemDraw are the binary CDX and the preferred

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

-based CDXML formats. ChemDraw can also import from, and export to, MOL, SDF, and SKC chemical file formats. Images can be exported to

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, PNG,

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

, and SVG. 3D printing of molecules can also be performed with the

3MF 3D Manufacturing Format or 3MF is an open source file format standard developed and published by the 3MF Consortium. 3MF is an XML-based data format designed specifically for additive manufacturing. It includes information about materials, colors ...

format.

Features of ChemDraw

File format

References

See also