What Are CTfile and CTAB

Molecule Tutorials - Herong's Tutorial Examples

∟What Are CTfile and CTAB

This section provides a quick introduction of the SDF (Structure Data File) format. An example of SDF file is also provided.

What CTfile (Chemical Table File)? - CTfile refers to six file formats that are used to store chemical information in a table style. All CTfile formats shares a common structure called CTAB (Connection Table), which describes the structural relationships and properties of a collection of atoms.

Below are short descriptions of CTfile formats:

Molfile (Molecule File) - Describes a single molecular structure which can contain disjoint fragments. A Molfile is a 3-line header and CTAB structure.
RGfile (Rgroup File) - Describes a single molecular query with Rgroups (Relationship Groups). Each RGfile is a combination of CTABs defining the root molecule and each member of each Rgroup in the query.
rxnfile (Reaction File) - Contains the structural information for the reactants and products of a single reaction.
SDfile (SDF - Structure Data File) - Contains structures and data for any number of molecules. A SDfile uses a Molfile and custom data to form a molecule structure. And multiple molecule structures are concatenated to support multiple molecules.
RDfile (RDF - Reaction Data File) - Contains reactions as well as molecules, together with their associated data.
XDfile (XML Data File) - XML-based data format for transferring recordsets of structure or reaction information with associated data.