NAOMI: On the Almost Trivial Task of Reading Molecules from Different File formats

In most cheminformatics workflows, chemical information is stored in files which provide the necessary data for subsequent calculations. The correct interpretation of the file formats is an important prerequisite to obtain meaningful results. Consistent reading of molecules from files, however, is not an easy task. Each file format implicitly represents an underlying chemical model, which has to be taken into consideration when the input data is processed. Additionally, many data sources contain invalid molecules. These have to be identified and either corrected or discarded. We present the chemical file format converter NAOMI, which provides efficient procedures for reliable handling of molecules from the common chemical file formats SDF, MOL2, and SMILES. These procedures are based on a consistent chemical model which has been designed for the appropriate representation of molecules relevant in the context of drug discovery. NAOMI’s functionality is tested by round robin file IO exercises with public data sets, which we believe should become a standard test for every cheminformatics tool.