A person sits at a computer with molecule drawings on the screen.
Chemistry professor Jeremiah Gassensmith, shown in his office on Oct. 26, created ChemDraft, a free alternative to the chemical structure drawing software ChemDraw.
Credit:
University of Texas at Dallas
A chemistry professor has used artificial intelligence to make a free replacement for the popular chemical drawing and spectral prediction software ChemDraw. Jeremiah Gassensmith, who studies the interaction of inorganic materials with living systems at the University of Texas at Dallas, unveiled ChemDraft last week via a post on the social media site Bluesky.
For decades, chemists have used ChemDraw to create digital renderings of chemical structures. Although alternatives to the ubiquitous software, which is owned by Revvity Signals Software, have come and gone over the years, AI is now making it easy for anyone to create their own version by the computer programming method known as vibe coding.