What's New on Klotho

• February 28, 2002:

  We have released the contents of our project in the public domain and the public release notes can be seen here.

• January 11, 2001:

  We've cross-referenced Klotho's pages to search results from The Agora. Now all we have to do is finish the revisions to The Agora and mount the revised interface publicly so you can access the pages that way too ;-).

• September 14, 2000:

  We've spruced up the manual a bit. The changes are intended to make navigation easier and to improve visual clarity.

• May 2, 2000:

  We've written a manual for Klotho! Right now it covers just compound specification and generation; a section on substructure searching is due soon.

• February 17, 2000:

  Many have asked if there's anything new going on with Klotho. The answer is Yes!, though the activity is still behind the scenes. We've worked out an improved method for calculating approximate charges on atoms in molecules (no more funny charges for pi-deficient and pi-excessive rings) and are now attempting to interface Klotho's code to GAMESS for the calculation of molecular geometries by semi-empirical methods. We're hopeful the latter will provide better structures than CONCORD (for example, planar amines on adenine).

  Even more importantly, we're developing The Agora, a system for the community to enter, review, and query information on biochemical reactions --- including of course compounds (so you don't have to wait for us to make your compound for you any more) --- using the pattern recognition operations offered by Klotho's (and Atropos's, who hasn't been introduced yet) grammars. We've been joined in this work by our colleagues Lynda Ellis and Guang Yao at the University of Minnesota and Keith Tipton, Sinead Boyce, and Andrew McDonald of Trinity College, Dublin. In addition to developing new methods we've been doing quite a lot of work on the "back office" operations for building, accessing, and maintaining the web sites. That's the reason we haven't done much about maintaining this site, since so much of the Web-related infrastructure is changing.

  We hope to have the first version of The Agora up and running shortly. In the interim, you can have a look at some papers describing Moirai and using its (well, really, their!) underlying theory in unusual ways.

  We want to thank everyone who's inquired about what's going on, and urge you to keep an eye on the site.

• June 13, 1996:

  The first attempt at refereed community entry for Klotho appears with 18 compounds involved in microbial degradation of xenobiotics. This is an experiment with Eva C. Young and Lynda Ellis of the University of Minnesota Biocatalysis/Biodegradation Database, but all are welcome to join!

• November 15, 1995:

  Klotho's molecules are now cross-referenced by ExPaSy. A warm welcome to those entering via this route!

• August 28, 1995:

  The publications list has been reordered (putting the most recent work first!) and the transfer mechanism switched from gopher to http. Please let me know if there are any problems.

• August 21, 1995:

  • Klotho's home page has been revised, moving the compound listing to a separate page and simplifying the index.

  • A paper with suggestions for trans-Web federation of databases and computations, based on my experience with Moirai has been added.

• December 20, 1994:

  • Implementation of accession numbers for all pages. See here for a description.

  • The Institute server has switched temporarily to the CERN HTTPD server. You may find that the interactive viewer (or something else) doesn't work; if so please drop me a line.

  • Roughly 120 more compounds, to total 439.

  • Slides for two recent talks. The Tokyo talk has a little more narrative than the Woods Hole talk. Both include some hot gifs, so enjoy pointing and clicking.

• Around February, 1994:

  The Web manifestation of Klotho goes on line.

Back to Klotho's home page.