What is the Biotoolkit Monomer Service?
The Biotoolkit Monomer Service is the monomer library behind Discngine's biologics tools. It stores the building blocks that HELM sequences refer to by symbol: natural and non-natural amino acids, nucleotides, and chemical linkers, each with its structure, its attachment points and its cap groups.
Discngine applications resolve every symbol of a peptide against this library, and a peptide whose symbol is unknown has no structure until the monomer is registered here. The Biotoolkit Monomers web application is where your organisation curates that library.
Key capabilities
- Two layers of monomers: a public reference library shared by every organisation, read-only, and your organisation's private monomers, which you create and maintain.
- Structure-first registration: a monomer is defined by its SMILES with numbered attachment points. The application draws it before you save, and derives the R-groups from the structure.
- Bulk import: load a CSV or Excel file of monomers, follow the import in the file history, and download an error file for the rows that failed.
- A browsable catalogue: the Home report shows every monomer with its drawing, filters on any column, counts the catalogue overall and per polymer type, and opens any drawing full size in a structure viewer.
- Duplicate detection: the same structure cannot be registered twice within a polymer type, and a private monomer cannot shadow a public one.
- Full history: every material change and every deletion is archived. An Administrator can compare the before and after of an edit, and put a deleted monomer back.
Roles
Access is granted per organisation, with one of three roles:
| Role | What it allows |
|---|---|
| Viewer | Browse the public library and your organisation's monomers, open a monomer to read its definition and structure, download the reports. Nothing can be changed. |
| Manager | Everything a Viewer can do, plus registering monomers: create and edit private monomers on the form, and import them in bulk. |
| Administrator | Everything a Manager can do, plus deleting monomers, reading the Version Log and reviving deleted monomers. |
Everything you create is visible to your organisation only. Its name is shown in the top bar of the application.
Guides
| Guide | Audience | Description |
|---|---|---|
| How to Create or Edit a Monomer | Managers | Register a monomer from its SMILES, preview the structure, set the cap groups |
| How to Import Monomers in Bulk | Managers | Load a file of monomers and fix the rows that failed |
| How to Review a Monomer's Version History | Administrators | Read the Version Log and revive a deleted monomer |
| Public Monomers | Everyone | Why some monomers are read-only, and how they relate to yours |
| Monomer Types, Polymer Types and Natural Analogs | Everyone | What the classification fields mean and how they constrain each other |
| Attachment Points and CAP Groups | Everyone | How R-groups are written in SMILES and what a cap group is |
| Versioning and Deletion | Everyone | What counts as a new version, and what deleting really does |
| Canonical SMILES and Duplicate Detection | Everyone | How the service decides that two monomers are the same |
| Import File Format | Managers | Every column of the import file |
| Release Notes | Everyone | What changed in each release |