Public information is only useful if it is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The Pistoia Alliance was pleased to organise with the support of our friends at the Hyve the recent FAIR workshop in Utrecht, and is committed to promoting FAIR principles among the life science community.

Fairsharing.org provides a resource that allows scientists to browse standards, databases and data policies. Part of ELIXIR, Fairsharing.org has more than 1,000 standards and we are pleased to announce that HELM is now available in this collection.

HELM (Hierarchical Editing Language for Macromolecules) enables the representation of a wide range of biomolecules (e.g. proteins, nucleotides, antibody drug conjugates) whose size and complexity render existing small-molecule and sequence-based informatics methodologies impractical or unusable. HELM solves this problem through a hierarchical notation that represents complex macromolecules as polymeric structures and includes support for unnatural components (e.g. unnatural amino acids) and chemical modifications.

To see the Pistoia Alliance HELM FAIR entry please visit https://fairsharing.org/bsg-s001222/, or to find out more, go to OpenHELM.org.