From 31st August to 3rd September more than 700 scientists from 66 nations all over the world came together in Naples, Italy, for one of the biggest conferences on natural products research: the 73th International Congress and Annual Meeting of the Society of Medicinal Plant and Natural Product Research.
One highlight of the 3-day congress was the keynote lecture from Prof. Christoph Steinbeck, the spokesperson of NFDI4Chem, about “Bioinformatics, chemoinformatics and FAIR data management in natural products research”. His lecture encompassed an overview of selected open source software for chemists and promoted the idea of open science and data sharing. Sharing well-curated data in a machine readable format is inevitable, if we want to gain more knowledge with the use of the rapidly evolving AI technology in the future.
A similar idea is followed by the noBS (natural product biodata sharing) consortium. In a lunch session, the noBS consortium members, including Christoph Steinbeck and Chandu Nainala, presented various tools and freely available databases, such as COCONUT, which facilitate data analysis and data sharing for scientists. The more the merrier: they encourage all chemists to share their data on the presented databases and grow the collection of openly available chemical structures, NMR or MS spectra.
Während des gesamten Kongresses war NFDI4Chem mit einem Stand vertreten. Forscher verschiedener Karrierestufen und Nationalitäten waren daran interessiert, etwas über Forschungsdatenmanagement im Allgemeinen zu erfahren, und waren begeistert von den Open-Source-Tools und -Dienstleistungen, die NFDI4Chem anbietet. Insbesondere Chemotion ELN, nmrXiv mit nmrium-Integration sowie andere Repositorien und das RDMO-Template stießen auf großes Interesse. Am letzten Tag präsentierten Chandu Nainala und Franziska Eberl ihre Poster zu COCONUT (größte offene Sammlung zu Naturstoffen), nmrXiv (offene Datenbank für NMR-Spektren) und dem NFDI4Chem-Konsortium.
