Portable library to render 2D structural formulas as vector graphics from SMILES or InChI

Question

For a web-based project, I am looking for a piece of software to create a 2D vector graphics structural formula from a textual structure encoding scheme such as SMILES or InChI, running on the server or client, and callable via some kind of API.

I’m imagining a client- or server-side library that you could just use like this:

svg_output = lib.render_from_smiles(smiles_input);

Ideally, it would have the following properties:

• Take a SMILES or InChI representation of the compound as input
• Compute the structure graph and 2D positional data (positions of atoms, types of bonds, etc.)
• Render the structure in some kind of vector graphics representation (SVG would be perfect, but any other open format would do)
• Or, alternatively, just output the computed drawing parameters, to be passed on to a separate renderer (which would need to be written, but that is the less challenging part)
• Written in a language that is easy to use and deploy in web environments (PHP, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Go, etc.)
• If a renderer is included, allow me to control the rendering style (stroke width/colours, text attributes etc.)
• Open source or with license terms that are affordable to a non-profit project :)

The application just needs to render individual structures. No reaction mechanisms or anything fancy. Small organic molecules only.

I know there are various standalone software packages (ChemDraw, MarvinSketch etc.) that do this kind of thing, but I did not find anything that can be used as a library like this.

Any suggestions or ideas? Thank you!

Answer 1

You might want to have a look at Open Babel.

• It is licensed under GNU GPLv2
• It has bindings for Python
• It has bindings for PHP
• It has bindings for Ruby
• It can read (and write) SMILES
• It can read (and write) InChI
• It can write SVG
• It can write a list of painter commands

Answer 2

You should also look at RDKit, which is at its core is C++ code for manipulating molecular structures, but which also has Python and Java bindings. Most people use it via its Python bindings.

Here's some example code.

# import rdkit components
from rdkit import Chem
from rdkit.Chem import Draw
from rdkit.Chem.Draw import IPythonConsole
IPythonConsole.ipython_useSVG=True

# displaying an SVG structure (in a Jupyter notebook)
mol = Chem.MolFromSmiles('O=C(O)c1ccccc1OC(=O)C')
mol

Inside of a Jupyter notebook, that results in a nice SVG-formated image. . You can get a file of this image using the standard way to get SVG out of Jupyter notebooks, which I can't remember right now.

# 2D positional data for atoms
for atom in mol.GetAtoms():
    print (atom.GetIdx(), atom.GetSymbol(), atom.GetExplicitValence(), atom.GetIsAromatic())

# 2D positional data for bonds
for bond in mol.GetBonds():
    print (bond.GetIdx(), bond.GetBeginAtomIdx(), bond.GetEndAtomIdx(), bond.GetBondType())

The code above gives you just a sense of the flavor of how things are done, and just a few examples of properties available for bonds and atoms. It certainly isn't an exhaustive list of bond/atom properties. The output is:

(0, 'O', 2, False)
(1, 'C', 4, False)
(2, 'O', 1, False)
(3, 'C', 4, True)
(4, 'C', 3, True)
(5, 'C', 3, True)
(6, 'C', 3, True)
(7, 'C', 3, True)
(8, 'C', 4, True)
(9, 'O', 2, False)
(10, 'C', 4, False)
(11, 'O', 2, False)
(12, 'C', 1, False)
(0, 0, 1, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.DOUBLE)
(1, 1, 2, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.SINGLE)
(2, 1, 3, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.SINGLE)
(3, 3, 4, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)
(4, 4, 5, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)
(5, 5, 6, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)
(6, 6, 7, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)
(7, 7, 8, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)
(8, 8, 9, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.SINGLE)
(9, 9, 10, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.SINGLE)
(10, 10, 11, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.DOUBLE)
(11, 10, 12, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.SINGLE)
(12, 8, 3, rdkit.Chem.rdchem.BondType.AROMATIC)

Converting between/from/to InChI and SMILES is easy. Here's an example of InChI output.

    # output InChI
    Chem.MolToInchi(mol)

'InChI=1S/C9H8O4/c1-6(10)13-8-5-3-2-4-7(8)9(11)12/h2-5H,1H3,(H,11,12)'

You can learn a bit more about how to do common tasks in RDKit via this GitHub repo of example Jupyter Notebooks.

Answer 3

openchemlib is a library that can convert a smiles into a SVG. It can be used on the the server (Java) or on the client side (JavaScript).

https://github.com/Actelion/openchemlib

https://github.com/cheminfo/openchemlib-js