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.
During the whole congress, NFDI4Chem was present with a booth. Researchers at different career stages and of various nationalities were interested to learn about research data management in general, and were excited about the open source tools and services that NFDI4Chem offers. Specifically Chemotion ELN, nmrXiv with nmrium integration, as well as other repositories, and the RDMO template were of high interest. On the last day, Chandu Nainala and Franziska Eberl presented their posters on COCONUT (largest open collection on natural products), nmrXiv (open database for NMR spectra) and the NFDI4Chem consortium.
