Curating a Database

I have a quick question regarding curating a database. 

If I were to have people send files to me that I would upload into the database that contained structural and biological information, what would be the two-three best:

1) File format to have sent to me

2) Programs to produce that file format

 

Thank you very much for you time

1. IJC can read several formats (see here for details http://www.chemaxon.com/instantjchem/ijc_latest/docs/user/help/htmlfiles/moving_data/importing_data.html) but the best are probably SDF if you have structures and data, or SMILES if you have just structures. These are widely used formats and should be supported by most software.

2. IJC is probably the best! But others could be ISIS/Base, any of the chemistry plugins for Excel (none of these are free). The chemical sketchers (MarvinSketch, ISIS/Draw, SymxDraw, ChemDraw...) can aslo be used, but generally these are only good for single structures at a time, and not good for data). So this really depends on what you are wanting to do and what the source of the structures is.

 

Tim

Thank you kindly!!