
The ELN supports planning, description, storage, and management for the routine work of organic chemists. The Chemotion ELN is equipped with the basic functionalities necessary for the acquisition and processing of chemical data, in particular the work with molecular structures and calculations based on molecular properties. The web based application is available as an Open Source software that offers modern solutions for chemical researchers. The development of an electronic lab notebook (ELN) for researchers working in the field of chemical sciences is presented. The online version of this article (10.1186/s1332-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. The reworked editor can be used to generate molecular structures in reaction templates and to generate syntheses plans. The developments of the ELN-integrated Ketcher (ketcher-rails) support the retrieval of identifiers and structure-related information from external databases and the molecule-based calculation of analytical values. The editor has been implemented into an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) application which enables the use of the Ketcher editor for advanced operations in chemistry research. In addition, tools for the drawing of coordinative bonds to represent e.g. The Ketcher editor, available as an Open Source software package for drawing chemical structures, has been expanded to include several features that allow storage, management and application of templates, as well as the use of symbols for a planning and processing of solid phase synthesis. The resulting product, ChemTrove, has undergone a usability trial by selected academics and the resulting feedback will guide the future development of the underlying ELN technology. This has been done using plug-in technology to ensure maximum transferability with minimal effort of the chemistry functionality to other ELNs, and equally other subject-specific functionality to LabTrove. Here we describe the results of a collaboration between the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) and the University of Southampton, guided by the aims of the Dial-a-Molecule Grand Challenge, intended to achieve the best of both worlds and augment a discipline-agnostic ELN, LabTrove, with chemistry-specific functionality and using data provided by the ChemSpider platform. In designing an Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) there is a balance to be struck between keeping it as general and multidisciplinary as possible for simplicity of use and maintenance and introducing more domain-specific functionality to increase their appeal to target research areas.
