Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Dr. Lawrence McIntosh from the University of
British Columbia and Monica Li of the University of Alberta for
allowing us to use the data included in the examples. Also thanks to
Pierre-Yves Savard in Labo Stéphane Gagné's lab
for providing hnca data for this project.
Thanks to Dr. Ryan McKay, scientific director of Nanuc , whose workshops/presentations have allowed smartnotebook to be seen by many.
Thanks to Dr. Bruce Johnson, of course, whose far-sighted design of nmrview provided the impetus for this project to continue.
Thanks to those people who participated in the early years, see the history section.
Also at this time, Dr. Stephane Gagne's suggestions for building sequential
assignment chains was being formulated in a program called "peakcon". An
attempt to join the peakcon and CAMRA software resulted in the prototype
software dubbed "lisa" (logical interactive sequence assignment) in 1995.
Despite the success of lisa to assign the 3D data provided by Dr. Monica Li,
the project now needed a way to display spectra.
With much staff turnover and the ever increasing demand for
system analysts within the biochemistry department, the resources to
develop such software were not available.
Fortunately, in the latter 1990's the emergence of nmrview re-ignited interest
in this software project. Dr. Carolyn Slupsky and Robert Boyko were assigned
the task of merging the best elements of CAMRA (and lisa) with nmrview.
By 1999, a second prototype was developed dubbed "xchains" using
nmrview 4.1. The software generated little interest in our lab
(with the exception of Dr. Pascal Mercier) probably because few people were
doing assignment at the time and because of awkwardness of the interface.
Both Carolyn and Robert had other projects, xchains seemed destined
for obscurity.
It wasn't until late 2001 that Dr. Valerie Booth discovered the
software and her enthusiasm and fresh ideas kickstarted another round of
development. After a number of improvements were implemented, smartnotebook 0.9
was presented at the PENCE AGM in June 2002. Then in October of 2002
we presented smartnotebook 1.0 at the NANUC nmrview workshop. This was
the first time the software was made publicly available. The 30 users saw
a live demo and then got to play with the software at their linux machine.
Bouyed by the success at the workshop, smartnotebook 2.0 was released
quickly (early December) to address the issues of folded peaks and hnco
reference spectra.
After taking a few months break for other projects, Carolyn wrote the
smartnotebook paper accepted in J. Biomol NMR. Then Dr. Ryan McKay's
powerpoint presentation of snb v2.0 at the Biomolecular NMR Workshop in
Alabama in May/03 drew exceptional interest.
We managed to entice Leigh Willard back to the project for snb v3.0, the
new software was unveiled at our local PENCE seminar series to a room full
of experts on June 5, 2003. Presentation of smartnotebook at the Nanuc
workshop in August 2003 inspired a number of bug fixes.
The version 4.x releases marked a new snb on the inside. Stronger coding
and documentation standards adopted in preparation of future collaborative
efforts.
Version 5.x releases now center on the addition and support of more
experiment sets.
This file last updated:
Questions to:
bionmrwebmaster@biochem.ualberta.ca
Project History
Smartnotebook was derived out of initial attempts to automate
spectral assignment. In the early 1990's, Robert Boyko, Leigh Willard,
Tim Jellard, Dr. Wolfram Gronwald, Dr. Frank Sonnichsen, Dr. David Wishart and
Dr. Krishna Rajaranthnam started to formulate ideas about how to do automated
and semi-automated assignment. A suite of software emerged called "CAMRA"
which concentrated mostly on the statistical elements of the assignment
problem (Gronwald, J Biomol NMR, 1998).
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