Five Years of the KNIME Vernalis Cheminformatics Community Contribution

Since the official release as a KNIME Community Contribution in June 2013, the Vernalis KNIME nodes have increased from a single node (the ‘PDB Connector’ node) to around 126 nodes (November 2017; Version 1.12.0); furthermore, a number of nodes have been adopted into the core KNIME product. In this review, we provide a brief timeline of the development of the current public release and an overview of the current nodes. We will focus in more detail on three particular areas: nodes accessing publicly available information via web services, nodes providing cheminformatics functionality without recourse to a cheminformatics toolkit, and nodes using one of the cheminformatics toolkits present in KNIME. We will conclude with a number of case studies demonstrating the use of KNIME at Vernalis.