Indigo Toolkit

Overview

Indigo is a universal molecular toolkit that can be used for molecular fingerprinting, substructure search, and molecular visualization. Also capable of performing a molecular similarity search, it is 100% open source and provides enhanced stereochemistry support for end users, as well as a documented API for developers.

Indigo is based on a cheminformatics library that incorporates a number of unique algorithms developed by EPAM, as well as some standard algorithms well-known in the cheminformatics world. Since the core part of Indigo is written in modern C++ with no third-party code or dependencies except the ubiquitous zlib and libcairo, the toolkit provides outstanding performance and excellent portability.

Indigo is used by many corporations and institutions. This includes some Indigo-based commercial tools developed exclusively for our clients. Also, our open-source chemical search engine Bingo is developed on top of the Indigo library.

Why Select Indigo as Your Molecular SDK

Indigo SDK does not make any restrictions for developers. Whatever your favorite platform is—Java, C#, or Python, not to mention plain C—you can easily integrate Indigo into your application. All problems you may be afraid of, such as loading binary modules appropriate for the system, or threading issues, or stack overflows, are already solved for you. Also, it is easy to start, as the interface is very neat. No data types besides the absolute minimum required for it to work. No internal data formats. No painful initialization procedures.

Indigo SDK is highly configurable and extensible. You can write C/C++/C#/Java/Python plugins for it and distribute them independently.

Indigo has got support from the cheminformatics community. Any question or comment you have, you can always post it publicly and get a timely reply from the developers’ team.

Features

  • Input formats support: Molfiles/Rxnfiles v2000 and v3000, SDF, RDF, CML, SMILES, SMARTS.

  • Portability: Pre-built binary packages are provided for Linux and Windows (both 32-bit and 64-bit), and also for Mac OS X systems (both 10.5 and 10.6).

  • Molecule and reaction rendering. Best picture quality among all available products. Easy SVG support.

  • Automatic layout for SMILES-represented molecules and reactions.

  • Canonical (isomeric) SMILES computation.

  • Exact matching, substructure matching, SMARTS matching.

  • Matching of tautomers and resonance structures.

  • Molecule fingerprinting, molecule similarity computation.

  • Fast enumeration of SSSR rings, subtrees, and edge subgraphs.

  • Molecular weight, molecular formula computation.

  • R-Group deconvolution and scaffold detection. Pioneer work in computing the exact maximum common substructure for an arbitrary amount of input structures.

  • Combinatorial chemistry

  • Plugins support in the API. As a reference, please see the Renderer plugin distributed together with the Indigo API.

Portability

Indigo is written from scratch in portable C++ and supports Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. The rendering is done via Cairo vector graphics library. zlib and libpng are needed for Cairo. tinyxml is used to parse CML files. No other third-party components are used.

Indigo exposes the C interface to applications. Java and Python wrappers are available for all of the supported platforms. For Windows, there is also a .NET wrapper.

All of the the code of Indigo is thread-safe, and so its use does not present a problem in multi-threaded applications.

Documentation

To understand Indigo’s scope, start with the Concepts page. A quick reference of the API for all supported languages is provided in the API page. A separate page deals with the C interface. Various options that can be passed to the library are explained on the Options page.

GCC 2010 Presentation

Here is the presentation for the talk that was given in November 2010 in Goslar at the German Conference on Cheminformatics: PDF (396K).

And here is the poster presented at the same conference: PDF (3.1M).

KNIME Nodes

We provide a number of freely available nodes for the KNIME workflow engine. The nodes are based on Indigo and its Java SDK.

Java GUI Utilities

Two Indigo-based Java GUI applications are provided:

  • Legio — combinatorial chemistry

  • ChemDiff — visual comparison of two SDF or SMILES files

Command-Line Utilities

Three Indigo-based command-line utilities written in plain C are provided:

  • indigo-depict (former dingo-render) Molecule and reaction rendering utility.

  • indigo-cano (former cano-utility) Canonical SMILES generator.

  • indigo-deco (former deco) R-Group deconvolution utility.

Download and Install

Look at the Downloads page for the installation package suitable for your system.

Building from sources

Look at the Build page for the building manual.

License

  • Indigo version 1.0.0 was released under GNU General Public License v3.0

  • Indigo version 1.4.0 was re-licensed under Apache License, Version 2.

  • Current version of Indigo is distributed under Apache License, Version 2.

This program is free software: You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

You should have received a copy of the Apache License along with this program. If you have not, please see https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Feedback

Do you need assistance using our tools? Do you need a feature? Do you want to send a patch to us? Did you find a bug? Please use Github tickets package:

https://github.com/epam/Indigo/issues

For any other questions please use the following e-mail:

lifescience.opensource@epam.com

Commercial Availability

The Apache License v2.0 allows Indigo to be used as a component in proprietary software products.

If the Apache License v2.0 does not fit your needs, please contact us to discuss the purchase of a commercial license. You may need the commercial license if you want to:

  • Receive ongoing support and maintenance

  • Design and implement custom changes for the SDK

  • Do any other development/testing required for a proprietary software product

Visit our SolutionsHub page for more details