Carbohydrates, Drawing Conventions

There are no formal rules for the representation of chemical compounds, although a few special cases such as steroids and carbohydrates have evolved a preferred style. This chapter will outline the revised drawing conventions used in the Combined Chemical Dictionary (CCD) (see Section 1.2.1), which other chemists may wish to follow. (CCD diagrams have, however, been added continuously over a period of nearly thirty years. This description is of best current practice.) These rules, when followed, will result in a drawing style that is consistent and unambiguous to the reader. 

ChemSketch has some special-purpose building functions. The peptide builder creates a line structure from the protein sequence defined with the typical three-letter abbreviations. The carbohydrate builder creates a structure from a text string description of the molecule. The nucleic acid builder creates a structure from the typical one-letter abbreviations. There is a function to clean up the shape of the structure (i.e., make bond lengths equivalent). There is also a three-dimensional optimization routine, which uses a proprietary modification of the CHARMM force field. It is possible to set the molecule line drawing mode to obey the conventions of several different publishers. 

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