News

Matteo Cassotti is the winner for the best oral presentation at the “16th International Workshop on QSAR in Environmental and Health Sciences” held at Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri, Milan – Italy. Matteo gave a talk about a QSAR model that can be used in the framework of the European REACH regulation to predict acute toxicity of chemicals towards Daphnia magna.

An agreement has been finalised between REACH&Colours Italia Srl (Milano) and Università degli Studi di Milano – Bicocca (UNIMIB) with the aim of developing a new software, innovative, revolutionary and specifically oriented for the study of organic dyes, able to model the quantitative relations between molecular structure and specific properties of dye molecules (Q-SAR).

Environmental ChemOinformatic (ECO) is a collaborative action of 7 institutions from 5 EU countries (Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Italy). The primary objective is to contribute to the education of environmental chemo-informaticians who will receive an advanced training in both environmental sciences and computational in silico methods. The fellows of the network are expected to apply their knowledge for the implementation of REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals) in particular with respect to the replacement, refinement and reduction of animal tests by alternative (in silico and in vitro) methods.
ECO provides positions for short term fellowships. The detailed descriptions and specific skills required for each position are available at the web site http://www.eco-itn.eu/node/58.

At the 5th Meeting of the International Academy of Mathematical Chemistry (Dubrovnik, June 14-16 2009), Dr. Viviana Consonni has been elected as new member of the Academy on the basis of her research activity on molecular descriptors and mathematical chemistry. At the present moment, she is the youngest member of the Academy.

Prof. Roberto Todeschini and Davide Ballabio will be guests of honor in the 8th Iranian Chemometrics Workshop on Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR), that will be held in Zanjan, Iran (7-9 February 2009). During their stay in Iran, they’ll also give lectures in the universities of Teheran, Isfahan and Shiraz.

The MOLE db – Molecular Descriptors Data Base is a free on-line database constituted of 1124 molecular descriptors calculated on 234773 molecules, released by Milano chemometrics and QSAR research group. This data base is intended as a research and teaching tool and basically allows the researcher to: a) search for a specific group of molecules and analyse the corresponding values of molecular descriptors b) save in an output file the values of a block of molecular descriptors calculated on a group of molecules. Explore the MOLE db data base here!