4th German Conference on Chemoinformatics: 22. CIC-Workshop. November 9–11, 2008, Goslar, Germany

From the 9^th to the 11^th November 2008, the Chemistry-Information-Computers (CIC) division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh) has invited the chemoinformatics and modeling community to Goslar, Germany to participate in the 4th German Conference on Chemoinformatics (GCC). Almost 200 participants from 14 countries accepted the invitation making the event again one of the largest chemoinformatics conferences in Europe. The international symposium addressed a broad range of modern research topics in the field of computers and chemistry. The focus was on recent developments and trends in the fields of Chemoinformatics and Drug Development, Chemical Information, Molecular Modeling, Computational Material Science and Nanotechnology. In addition, other contributions from the field of Computational Chemistry were welcome.

The scientific program included one evening lecture [K. Varmuza(Austria)], six plenary lectures [J. Bajorath (Germany), M.R. Berthold (Germany), R. Herges (Germany), S.M. Bachrach (USA), R. C. Glen (UK), M. Elstner (Germany)], 16 general lectures as well as 77 poster presentations.

Traditionally, the conference started with a "Free-Software-Session" and the "Chemoinformatics Market Place" on Sunday afternoon right before the official conference opening at 5 pm. Numerous Open Source projects from the field of Chemoinformatics have been presented within the "Free-Software-Session" in the large lecture hall at the conference hotel 'Der Achtermann" in Goslar. In addition two software tutorials have been provided in parallel within the scope of the "Chemoinformatics Market Place": One software tutorial was provided by Xemistry GmbH covering some key technologies of their CACTVS application. In the second tutorial Chemical Computing Group offered insights into the new release of MOE.

After the official opening at 5 pm and a short introduction of the 10 exhibitors the first day ended with a conference dinner and the evening lecture of Kurt Varmuza on "Classification and Characterization of Materials – from Archaeometry to Comets".

Besides the scientific program a special highlight of the conference was the FIZ-CHEMIE-Berlin 2008 awards on Monday afternoon. The CIC division awards this price each year to the best diploma thesis and the best PhD in the field of Computational Chemistry. The PhD price was awarded to Dr. Oliver Korb from the group of Prof. Dr. Thomas Exner, Konstanz for his dissertation "Efficient Ant Colony Optimization Algorithms for Structure- and Ligand-based Drug Design". The award for the best diploma thesis has gone to Andreas Jahn from the group of Prof. Dr. Andreas Zell, Tübingen with the title "Die Erweiterung des Optimal Assignment Kernel (OAK) um konformationelle Flexibilität".

Finally, after 4 years the old GDCh-CIC division board handed over the divisions concerns to the new elected board members during the conference. The success of the German Conference on Chemoinformatics is definitely a credit to the old CIC board and we want to thank the retired board members Christoph Steinbeck, Gregor Fels and Rainer Herges for their work and engagement.

Pictures of the conference are available on the GDCh webserver: http://www.gdch.de/strukturen/fg/cic/tagungen/gcc_2008.htm