Review of “Contemporary computer-assisted approaches to molecular structure elucidation (new developments in NMR)” by Mikhail E Elyashberg, Antony Williams and Kirill Blinov

Book details Contemporary Computer-Assisted Approaches to Molecular Structure Elucidation (New Developments in NMR) by Mikhail E Elyashberg, Antony Williams and Kirill Blinov. Edited by William Price. RSC Publishing, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-84973-432-5; eISBN: 978-1-84973457-8. Computer-assisted structure elucidation (CASE) aims to provide users in chemistry, molecular biology, or other areas dealing with structures of small molecules with suggestions on the structural identity of molecules based on spectroscopic, chromatographic and other boundary information. With "Contemporary computerassisted approaches to molecular structure elucidation", Mikhail Elyashberg, Antony Williams and Kirill Blinov, all world-renowned experts on the topic, have recently written a normative standard text-book on the topic. Published by RSC publishing in 2012 and on 481 pages, the book provides a comprehensive overview on computerassisted structure elucidation. The book is divided into three parts comprised of overall 14 chapters. Part I lays out the fundamentals of CASE systems: the authors walk the reader through chapters covering different possible strategies for computer-assisted structure elucidation after which they give a brief history of the field. As the authors point out, the CASE process can be reduced to logically interfering ‘the most probable structural hypothesis from a set of statements reflecting the interrelation between a spectrum and structure’. Given that every human expert in structure elucidation will be biased by his or her own education, history of certain compound classes worked on, or types of spectroscopy