Basic Cheminformatics Course for First-Year Chemistry Students

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Cheminformatics is a widely used interdisciplinary field that is important for many chemistry areas. Cheminformatics skills are necessary for dealing with a large amount of chemical information and are considered essential for various tasks such as data analysis, visualization, storage, etc. This paper presents the basic cheminformatics chemistry semester-length course for first-year chemistry students, organized at the Novosibirsk State University. Students in the course learn literature and structural databases, search engines, chemical structure drawing and representation, graphing software, text formatting, scientific writing, and report representation. The course could be replicated as an entire course in chemical informatics or could be used as separate modules in other courses. We describe the face-to-face course and the adaptation to an online teaching model during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The students’ and lecturers’ feedback about the course program and results are also presented. We hope that this work can assist faculty members in teaching cheminformatics.