CDK: Element and Isotope information

When reading files the format in one way or another has implicit information you may need for some algorithms. Element and isotope information is a key example. Typically, the element symbol is provided in the file, but not the mass number or isotope implied. You would need to read the format specification what properties are implicitly meant. The idea here is that information about elements and isotopes is pretty standardized by other organizations such as the IUPAC. Such default element and isotope properties are exposed in the CDK by the classes Elements and Isotopes. I am extending my Groovy Cheminformatics with the CDK with these bits.

Elements
The Elements class provides information about the element's atomic number, symbol, periodic table group and period, covalent radius and Van der Waals radius, and Pauling electronegativity (Groovy code):

Elements lithium = Elements.Lithium
println "atomic number: " + lithium.number()
println "symbol: " + lithium.symbol()
println "periodic group: " + lithium.group()
println "periodic period: " + lithium.period()
println "covalent radius: " + lithium.covalentRadius()
println "Vanderwaals radius: " + lithium.vdwRadius()
println "electronegativity: " + lithium.electronegativity()

For example, for lithium this gives:

atomic number: 3
symbol: Li
periodic group: 1
periodic period: 2
covalent radius: 1.34
Vanderwaals radius: 2.2
electronegativity: 0.98

Isotopes

Similarly, there is the Isotopes class to help you look up isotope information. For example, you can get all isotopes for an element or just the major isotope:

isofac = Isotopes.getInstance();
isotopes = isofac.getIsotopes("H");
majorIsotope = isofac.getMajorIsotope("H")
for (isotope in isotopes) {
  print "${isotope.massNumber}${isotope.symbol}: " +
    "${isotope.exactMass} ${isotope.naturalAbundance}%"
  if (majorIsotope.massNumber == isotope.massNumber)
    print " (major isotope)"
  println ""
}

For hydrogen this gives:

1H: 1.007825032 99.9885% (major isotope)
2H: 2.014101778 0.0115%
3H: 3.016049278 0.0%
4H: 4.02781 0.0%
5H: 5.03531 0.0%
6H: 6.04494 0.0%
7H: 7.05275 0.0%

This class is also used by the getMajorIsotopeMass() method in the MolecularFormulaManipulator class to calculate the monoisotopic mass of a molecule:

molFormula = MolecularFormulaManipulator

  .getMolecularFormula(

    "C2H6O",

    SilentChemObjectBuilder.getInstance()

  )

println "Monoisotopic mass: " +

  MolecularFormulaManipulator.getMajorIsotopeMass(

    molFormula

  )

The output for ethanol looks like:

Monoisotopic mass: 46.041864812