ChemUI Seek: Download this cool chemical structure search application
August 12th, 2025 By John Widen
A former colleague and friend shared a nifty chemistry tool with me a couple weeks ago,
ChemUI Seek.
It is now on the Apple store for free and I highly encourage anyone that has many Chemdraw files,
PDFs, PowerPoints, and SDFs on their computer, or in the cloud, to download and use it. Currently,
it is only available for mac desktops, but I told him to make one for Windows as well.
We’ll see if he can do that in the near future. I’ll keep bugging him about it as a PC user
myself (Don’t judge me, and trust me, it is better for chemistry applications).
I made my partner download the app on their computer so I could use it and show you
a video of the app in action below!
Video. ChemUI Seek in Action
ChemUI Seek is a lightweight application that helps you search files for structures and substructures.
If you are a chemist, you undoubtedly have hundreds to thousands of files that contain chemical structures.
You might be an incredibly organized person…but I doubt it. Most people’s organizational skills could
use a little work. Instead of opening and closing files looking for a specific chemical structure for
minutes to hours or before you give up and just redraw it, you can use ChemUI Seek to find the exact
file with the chemical structure you are looking for in seconds! This might sound like an advertisement,
but I assure you I’m not getting paid for this. I’m not even getting lunch out of the deal.I genuinely think this application is incredibly useful. Picture this, you are a medicinal chemist.
You submitted a structure your boss designed to be synthesized by your CRO, but the synthesis went through
ten routes that failed. You put the molecule on hold. Months go by. Then, at a meeting your boss asks you
what happened to the molecule that he designed and submitted. They wonder: “Why hasn’t that molecule been
made yet.” You start sweating and sifting through your PowerPoint slides that your CRO sends every week to
summarize the ongoing syntheses. There are many PowerPoints and many slides to look for the synthesis of
the molecule. Your boss stares at you for ten minutes while you look for all of the failed routes from
two months ago. You don’t find them during the meeting and have to spend an hour looking through slide
decks to copy and paste into an email to send to your boss.Instead of this scenario, you read this blog post and made the correct decision to download ChemUI Seek.
Now, when your boss or anyone else brings up a molecule they designed and ask why it never was synthesized
you can search for the structure in the weekly synthesis updates folder and find the failed
syntheses in seconds!ChemUI Seek is very straightforward to use. You navigate to a folder, draw or paste a structure/substructure,
and hit search. The app searches through any files within the folder and tells you what files contain the structure.
If it is a substructure, it will identify any structure containing the substructure and the file it resides in.
This application will save so much time. If not, you can get your money back. Think about how many times you
search your folders using the text box in the upper right corner of your finder window and apply that to
looking for chemical structures.The application can find structures and schemes that have been copy/pasted from Chemdraw or
any other chemical editor application. It doesn’t have to be a .cdx, .cdxml, or .sdf. Download it and try it out!
If you have comments or questions, there is an easy submission form on the ChemUI website linked above.
He made ChemUI Seek as a hobby and is also developing another application, ChemUI Sketch, for structure
drawing on your phone. So, keep a look out for that.GO DOWNLOAD CHEMUI SEEK. Worst case scenario is you use it once and never again.
The site does not have a comments section yet! Hopefully, very soon! Until then please drop me a line at jwiden@chemjam.com.
If you provide comments on my articles I reserve the right to post them on this website as additional commentary. My goal is to have an open discussion!
